Inside Joplin Obituaries reaches milestone 9,000th obituary

The tornadoes that swept through this area Wednesday night caused me to delay posting this, but earlier that day, the Inside Joplin Obituaries blog posted its 9,000th obituary since its creation in November 2013.

I have noted each of these milestones beginning with the 1,000th and when I wrote about that one, I was surprised that a couple of readers took me to task because they thought it was inappropriate to be celebrating the deaths of 1,000 people.

That was not what i was doing.

I was celebrating the lives of those 1,000 people and as of earlier this week Inside Joplin Obituaries has celebrated the lives of 9,000 people.

The idea for Inside Joplin Obituaries began after the May 22, 2011 Joplin Tornado. I made an early decision that I was going to post the obituaries of everyone who died and I came close to doing so. I was caught off guard by the positive reaction. I had done it because I thought it was something that needed to be done as part of compiling the record of the most horrific event to hit this city.

Later, when John Hacker and I published our book 5:41: Stories from the Joplin Tornado,  one of the most well-received segments of the book was our printing of the complete obituaries.

At that time, I began thinking of printing obituaries, but they did not fir into the framework of what I was doing with the Turner Report. Nor did I have the time to do so. At that point, I was still a full-time classroom teacher and compiling obituaries is a time-consuming process, especially at the beginning as the process is being established.

In 2013, thanks to the R-8 Board of Education, I had the time and I pulled the trigger on the creation of the blog.

Inside Joplin Obituaries would print complete free obituaries. Nothing has irritated me over the years than the decision of newspaper executives to start charging for obituaries so they could have another revenue stream.

Something is inherently wrong with charging grieving family members to let people know their loved one has passed and to create a record of that passing.

At one time, the saying about community newspapers was that you were guaranteed to make the news twice- when you were born and when you were died.

Now, thanks to the kind of corporate greed that has contributed to the decline of newspapers, there is a whole subclass of people whose names may never grace the pages of a newspaper. And if you could charge to print obituaries, you could also charge to print wedding announcements, engagements, anniversaries and the other news items that were once the lifeblood of community newspapers.

Is it any wonder newspaper circulation has plummeted when so many people no longer have any connection to newspapers run by out-of-town owners who only see dollar signs from the things that were once considered to be news.

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Thanks for supporting the Turner Report/Inside Joplin/Inside Joplin Obituaries.

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During my years at the Lamar Democrat and the Carthage Press, I frequently ran surveys covering every regular item featured in those newspapers to determine what was being read and how readers felt about what we were providing them.

Invariably, obituaries ranked at the top of the list. I had every reason to believe there would be a strong readership for Inside Joplin Obituaries.

The first decision that had to be made was what obituaries would be posted. I decided on obituaries of people who lived in Jasper, Newton, Barton and McDonald counties, people who used to live in one of those counties and people who had survivors who lived in those counties.

In addition to the funeral homes in those areas, I also receive obituaries from northeast Oklahoma, southeast Kansas and northwest Arkansas funeral homes, as well as funeral homes from Pierce City, Mount Vernon, Monett, Branson, Nevada, Stockton and other communities.

Sometimes, obituaries come from other sources.

I use Google Alerts to let me know when someone who has a connection to this area dies in some other state and somewhere else in Missouri.

The invaluable John Hall of Columbia, a former Carthage resident who has written so much over the years about the old KOM minor league baseball league and other area minor league teams, publishes a newsletter in which he often prints obituaries of people who played minor league baseball in this area in the 1940s and 1950s, which I share on my blog.

Every once in a while, I will post an obituary of someone who has a different kind of connection to this area, such as the obituaries of the two Barry County residents who were killed in a drunk driving accident in Granby or the obituary of Ken Rothman, the former lieutenant governor, who was the featured speaker at the 100th birthday celebration for Harry S Truman in Lamar in 1984.

The obituaries have included everyone from beloved citizens to a man executed for committing a a brutal murder, people as old as 106 to those who were stillborn.

I cannot count the times I have read an obituary and wished I had met that person and there have been many, far too many, that I knew personally.

In January 2017, I launched Inside Pittsburg Obituaries, which has published more than 700 southeast Kansas obituaries and has continued to expand.

Thanks for your support, both from the encouragement I have received from so many of you and from those you who have contributed financially.

Thanks to you more than 9,000 lives have been celebrated and more will be celebrated in the future.