Obituaries and Death Notices
in the Jonesboro Gazette
1858-1939
Jonesboro, Union County, Illinois
The Jonesboro Gazette began publication as a weekly in 1849 and was published every Saturday in Jonesboro, Union County, Illinois. According to the History of Alexander, Union, and Pulaski Counties, Illinois(1883), the newspaper was started by Thomas J. Finley and John Evans, who operated it until about 1853, when they sold it to the Rev. H.E. Hempstead. From 1855 to about 1857, it was owned by John Grear, who sold it in 1857 to John Dougherty. About 1859, it passed into the hands of a company of owners, of whom E.C. McKinney had the controlling interest, but it was sold in about a year, back to its founder, John Evans.
William Jones owned the newspaper at the outbreak of the Civil War. In May 1863 Union authorities closed the office doors and ordered the publisher to cease publication because of “disloyal articles” which had been appearing in the paper. Tradition says that the Union soldiers of the 14th Iowa destroyed all the copies of the newspaper from 1849 to 1861. Only a few issues of the Jonesboro Gazette from those years are known to exist. In March 1864, Joel Morgan reopened the paper. After less than a year, James D. Perryman purchased it and sold it in September 1866 to Thomas F. Bouton. He then sold it to his son-in-law, A.S. Tibbets, in 1892. Tibbets was still the editor and publisher in 1899.
Copies of death notices or obituaries can be ordered, for a fee, from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (formerly the Illinois State Historical Library),112 North Sixth Street, Springfield, IL 62702. The microfilm of the Abraham Lincoln Library can also be ordered through interlibrary loan, if one wishes to do his or her own research. The Gazette-Democrat has bound most of the original extant issues of the Jonesboro Gazette, but they are not available for public use.
The Index to Obituaries and Death Notices in the Jonesboro Gazette 1858 - 1883 was published in book form by GSSI in 1996. Entries for 1900 appeared in The Saga of Southern Illinois, Volume XXIV #3 (July-September 2007) and for 1901 in Volume XXXV, #3 (July-September 2008).
- To view the obituaries and death notices, click on the year you are interested in seeing.
- All files are in a PDF format and can easily be searched (use Command + C [Mac platform] or Control + C [Windows platform] to bring up the search window).
TAKE NOTE: we are still in the process of moving the obits to our new site so please be patient while we complete this. Obits listed below that are available are in blue.
