The Tulsa Star

The Tulsa Star was a newspaper in Tulsa from 1913 to at least 1922. Copies have been scanned and scanned images are available at the National Archives "Chronicling Amearica" site.

For the past week I have been extracting notices of death from this newspaper. The unique aspect is that the paper was a Black/Negro/Colored newspaper, so the vast majority of local news articles were about Blacks in Tulsa. At least that is what one would think.

This paper served ALL of northeast Oklahoma and had regular "correspondent" columsn with local news from McAlester, Bartlesville, Okmulgee, Claremore, Boley, Sapulpa, Coweta, and many other towns in Oklahoma.

Most of the death notices simply contain the person's name, death date, perhaps a relationship, date and location of the funeral, and the name of the undertaker/funeral home. BUT...a great source for Tulsans not likely recorded elsewhere.

In all, I was able to find 288 different death notices from 1913 through the end of 1919. Only a few are for the prominent in the community. Many are for infants and those murdered. Many others are from correspondent columns from across northeast Oklahoma or for the Greenwood neighborhood and Gurley Addition in Tulsa.

The search "engine" on Chronicling America leaves much to be desired. In one case I was searching for all occurrences of the word "funeral". It brought up a page with the word funeral highlighted within a death notice. But it failed to recognize the word "funeral" in the headline for another death entry on the same page. So I'm sure I missed many death notices, but that will be the case for all papers I search on-line.

Also added to the index this week are pre1920 burials in Riverside Cemetery at Mangum OK, Fairview Cemetery at Tuttle, and more entries from Oklahoma's Confederate Pension Index cards.

Darlington, Indian Territory newspaper

With Oklahoma Territory being opened to settlement in Apr 1889 I am always surprised to see records predating that date. However, all of Oklahoma was Indian Territory prior to Oklahoma Territory being established. And the US government had military posts and forts scattered throughout the Territory. One Indian agency was the Cheyene/Arapahoe Agency at Darlington IT.

This Agency published a newspaper called The Cheyenne Transporter. Copies have been scanned and are available for research at the Library of Congress' site "Chronicling America".

I searched separately for 12 key words/phrases related to deaths (death, died, murdered, suicide, etc.). In issued from 1880 through 1886 I was able to find 119 recordings of deaths in the bounds of current Oklahoma. These have now been added to the Pre1920 Oklahoma Death Index. The one thing that bothers me about extracting these records is that it takes so long. To get these 119 records, I spent approximately 20 hours of research time over a 10 day period.

One must realize that I skipped over about the same number of obits/death notices for people who died outside of Oklahoma and who had never lived in Oklahoma. Many were residents of southern Kansas and western Missouri, relatives of residents of Darlington IT.

Currently, I'm working on the Tulsa Star, a Black/Colored/Negro/Afro-American newspaper. Scanned issues are available at Chronicling America from 1913-1922.