Some weekly newspapers would publish a “days beyond recall” or a similarly titled column containing items from issues that had been published decades before. Just because your relative died in 1855 does not mean he might not be mentioned 40 years later. It can happen.
My relative died accidentally in 1855 and several decades later in a retrospective column his death was mentioned.
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Wow! Was that a surprise 4 u?
Our local daily newspaper has a weekly “Looking Back” column, in which they republish brief stories from 100 years ago, 75 years ago, 50 and 25 years ago. I have an actual clipping my dad spotted c. 1975, announcing that his grandfather (my great-gpa) had been hired as railroad contractor for a certain stretch of tracks in the Tacoma area. The hiring had been 75 years earlier, or 1900. I’ve made a few photocopies of the clipping, and a digital copy, also. All my hundreds of other scandalous newspaper articles about him were contemporaneous.