This post is an adaptation of a slideshow about the Online Obituary Index originally written by Dennis Adams and Grace Cordial as part of a South Carolina Library Association Conference circa 2004. It has been edited, annotated, and updated by Cassandra Knoppel and Grace Cordial in 2025.
An obituary is a notice of a death, especially in a newspaper, typically including a brief biography of the deceased person.
Obituaries are very useful death records. Our customers use obituaries to build family trees and compile family histories. The BDC staff use them to create social media, write Finding Aids to archival collections, and in presentations promoting BDC materials and services. They are very useful -- so useful in fact that BDC staff and volunteers have dedicated countless hours since 1998 creating an index to obituaries published in historic local newspapers.
BCL's Online Obituary Index Project (OOI) has sought to fill in the gaps of knowledge, lost due to time and circumstance, on Beaufort County's citizens of yore for the past 28 years. The Obituary Index is one of the most frequently used sources in the Research Room. With over 33,000 entries at present, it is a foundation of the BDC's array of materials and services.
Dennis Adams who devised the project saw it as a 5-dimensional undertaking that lured all involved into the "Twilight Zone" of Beaufort County's past:
Dimensions 1 and 2 are the physical confines of Beaufort County: longitude and latitude. The Beaufort District Collection is limited to the bounds of Beaufort County, so our collection and thus the OOI cannot go any further than the county line.
With a "high point" of 42 feet above sea level, Beaufort County has virtually no altitude. But the fact that the area is broken up into 68 inhabitable islands adds a 3rd dimension of isolation.
The 4th dimension of time adds (more) area to the project. Present-day Hampton and Jasper Counties once were part of the Beaufort District, you see, which circles us back to dimensions 1 and 2. Time also removes us from the moment of creation and distances us from the memory more and more.
And the 5th Dimension?
Loss of Beaufort’s public records before and after the Civil War. Beaufort's status as a burned county means that records prior to 1860 were largely destroyed due to the War, but that doesn't mean that records or other material created after the War was saved for posterity and kept away from the
Agents of Deterioration (the
four ten horsemen of an archival apocalypse, if you will).
Navigating these five dimensions to arrive at the OOI was described as "quite the adventure. In 1998, BCL set out to index the obituaries embedded in their historic newspaper collections on microfilm. They had limited resources to do so. It was decided to test the project with some of the shorter runs of the local newspapers first.
The original goals of the Obituary Index File Project were:
1. Access
2. Convenience
3. Sustainability
4. Adaptability
5. Generating income
Goals 1 through 4 remain. Goal #5, "Generating Income," is no longer a priority in 2025. We moved away from charging remote customers for copies of obituaries during the COVID-19 crisis in 2020.
For the first 20 or so years, creating the obituary card files and the online obituary index was a rather intense process as the illustration shows. Dennis created a style guide for forms of names and newspaper citations that we still use today to populate the database behind the OOI.
Mrs. Virginia Adams, mother of BCL's own Dennis Adams, worked the project from its inception until her eyes no longer worked. Her mantle was picked up and carried forth by other beloved BDC Docents: Carole Holland, Merle Hoagland, Laura Lewis, Jan Johnson, Nelson Brown, and most recently, Kathy Mitchell. I thank each and every one of of the Beloved Docents, past and present, living and dead, for your dedication and persistence in competently performing your volunteer duties to index the obituaries from our local newspapers.
The first iteration of the Online Obituary Index was based on Microsoft WORD. Dennis would periodically make a print out of the list just to be sure that we would not lose the data. Dennis and Grace commented at the SCLA Conference that the 2000's Web Technology for the BDC OOI and the WORD-based Obit Index documents "boxed" them in like a casket.
The second iteration of the OOI looked like this:
To increase access and findability, they were looking into the option of creating a searchable database for future use, a dream which has since materialized - though it did take some time. Years, in fact. In 2009 we tested a database that I gave the unfortunate name of "deadpeople" shown here:
Some of our customers thought it in bad taste so we changed it from "deadpeople" to "ooi" in the next iteration of the obituary index that came a few years later. It's been OOI ever since.
In a Connections post of March 19, 2012, we announced that "The Online Obituary Index file was being moved into a new format by the Library's IT staff" and promised that "the improvement will be worth the wait." Stuart Forrest transferred the data to a free POWERED BY
account.
The Online Obituary Index successfully migrated to the Beaufort County Library's website set up in 2016.
In 2021, we stopped creating physical obituary card files. Rest assured that the old style obituary cards created with the tedious process outlined earlier in this post remain in the Obituary card drawers. Our current OOI volunteer, Kathy Mitchell, reads and rolls the microfilm of the Beaufort Gazette and the Island Packet a year at a time entering the name and citation data directly into the OOI database. She's added more than 5000 entries since she took on the duty.
Keeping up with technological changes and sustainability are always the key considerations as we plan for what comes next for the OOI. We know that we must sustain the integrity of the OOI; be able to add and edit entries; that the platform must be free or low cost; that the data storage is secure; and that the data remains available for our customers into the future.
The Library's IT person, Stuart Forrest, was transferred to the County's IT department a few years ago during a County reorganization effort but he recently upgraded the OOI for us to its 4th iteration.
At this time, we have no plans to digitize the individual physical obituary card files. We do not have access to the storage necessary for such large files.
As I say during our periodic Behind-the-Scenes tours, when I was interviewed for a job as a Beaufort County Library Reference Librarian in 1999, I was asked what was my least favorite library task. I answered: "Filing catalog cards." Well, guess the location of the only library card catalog left in the entire Beaufort County Library system? It's the Beaufort District Collection's obituary card files! It is sort of cool to be the caretaker of a historic organizational system.
I'll be talking about the death related resources soon in case you'd like to learn more about how the BDC marks the inevitability of death. The program is free for anyone who'd like to attend.
Monday, October 27, 2025 - "Tales from the Crypt: Death in the Archives" with Grace Cordial. BDC@ Beaufort Branch Library, 311 Scott Street 5:30 - 6:30 PM. All are welcomed.
Looking ahead: The Library will be closed for Veterans Day on Tuesday, November 11, 2025.
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