Great resource - NEW Source

If you go to the New York Times site, you can enter your search terms in the bar near the top of the page and select whether you want to search articles since 1981 or before 1981. Once you have your results, you can select the Advanced option to limit your search to specific dates. The stories are downloadable as PDF documents. (If you happen across articles that aren't in the free years, they're $4.95 each, or you can get a monthly pass for $7.95 that allows 100 story downloads.)
I used a couple of Ohio place names and found real gold...many surnames, too. Try it.

Stark County resources

http://www.starklibrary.org/starkcountyonlineind.htm

The Stark County, Ohio library is one of the best resoiurces online for research. I have visited the library and found the personnel to be more than helpful. But here is an index, by year, to the newspaper which goes back to 1815 for obituaries. There are other resources on the web site and the library staff responds to requests very quickly.

Here is a copy of an obit I ordered and received within two weeks. nThis was dated 1935

Free Mortality Schedules online

Search Online Mortality Schedules for Free
Bill Cribbs, the man behind the GenealogyBuff.com free genealogy search engine site, has gathered hundreds of counties’ online transcribed mortality schedules and made them searchable at MortalitySchedules.com.
For the 1850 through 1880 US censuses, enumerators recorded names of and other details about people who’d died within the past year. These mortality schedules may be the only death record for some people, especially in states that didn’t require recording of deaths until later. You can browse MortalitySchedules.com by state or search on one or more keywords, such as a name or place. (If you want matches to contain more than one keyword, select “Find all words” from the dropdown menu.) When you click on a match, you'll be taken to the Web site that stores the transcribed records. What you see varies depending how the data was transcribed and digitized. You may get a chart or a text file listing a few details of deaths in that enumeration district, or you may get the whole shebang: the deceased’s age and marital status at death; death date, place and cause; birth date and place; physician’s name; parents’ birthplaces and more.