Joliet Herald-News Obituary Index, 1973-2012

This database of obituaries was created by the Joliet Public Library based on death notices appearing in the Joliet Herald-News. It covers the years 1973-2012.

Joliet, Illinois is the county seat of Will County and is served by the daily Joliet Herald-News. The Herald-News is rich in local news. Joliet is about 45 miles southwest of Chicago. Industry in the region attracted many immigrant groups-- Poles included. Not far from Joliet is Lemont (in Cook County) with a large Polish-American population. So death notices from that community often were published in this newspaper. Joliet, Lockport and other communities in Will County also have Polish families so this index is of value to the Polish genealogist. Obituaries since 2012 can probaly be found online.

Let's talk about the search form. The "Search option" rationale is discussed in the article, Searching Databases Efficiently, and also summarized at the bottom of this search form. The 'Given name' field is currently set up for wildcard search. This can give a lot of irrelevant results but does allow you search for alternate names (like a woman's maiden name). The indexers did not have a separate field for maiden names but are sometimes listed after a woman's given name.

The obituary index is based primarily on the person's surname at the time of death. What about the maiden names of married women? What about aliases that people may have used? Such additional names will generally not be found searching the Surname field. The researcher will need to search the Given name field which for this database was a 'catch all' field. It could include a middle initial, a full middle name, maiden name, alias, title, rank, nickname, etc. Initially, I tried to parse the Given name field into its components. But with over 20,000 results, editing it was going to be a monumental task. In addition, I would never be able to tell if the edit was correct. For example, if someone was listed as Ida May, do I assume May is her middle name or is it her maiden name? So rather than me making assumptions, I'll let the researcher decide. In conclusion, if you want to find women with a particular maiden name, enter it (without the given name) in the 'Given name' search box instead of the usual Surname box.

exact match: enter the name exactly the way you want it found (e.g., Adam will find ONLY Adam).

match first: enter the first part of name to be matched (e.g., Adam will find Adam, Adamik, Adamowski).

wildcard search: enter any part of the name (e.g., Adam will find Adam, Adamik, Adamowski, and Hadam).

Provided you are using "match first" or "wildcard search", you may use the % character to represent any number of letters and the _ (underline) character to represent one specific letter. Additional explanation here.