Finding and Reading Obituaries at Olson Funeral Home in Menomonie
Olson Funeral Home has been handling services in Dunn County for decades. If you are looking for obituaries, there is a specific way the process works, and knowing the channels helps you avoid wasting time. I have spent enough hours on this to know where people typically get stuck. The primary source is the Olson Funeral Home website at olsonfuneralhome.com. They maintain an online obituary section where recent and past notices are posted. The standard timeline is that an obituary goes up within 24 to 48 hours after the family makes arrangements, though sometimes it takes longer during busy periods. The page will include the deceased person's full name, age, a brief biographical sketch, service details, and surviving family members. Some entries also link to a guestbook where people can leave condolences. Beyond the website, Olson publishes obituaries through the Woodchuck Valley News and the Tri-City News in Eau Claire. These papers run a combined obituary column that covers multiple funeral homes across the region. If you are researching someone who passed more than a few weeks ago, those archives are actually more useful than the website because Olson tends to remove older notices from their own site after about 90 days. The newspaper archives stick around much longer, usually accessible through the paper's website or Microfilm at the local library.
I ran into a specific problem last year when trying to track down an obituary for an older relative who passed in early 2018. The online version on Olson's site was gone, and the newspaper archives online only went back to about 2020. What actually worked was calling the Menomonie Public Library and asking for the microfilm reader for the Tri-City News. The librarian pulled the exact issue within five minutes. You can do the same thing, or ask a librarian to pull it for you if you cannot go in person. This workaround saved me hours of searching. There is also a subtlety most people miss: Olson sometimes posts a brief death notice before the full obituary appears. A death notice is just a line or two with the basics, while the full obituary comes out later with the complete life story and service information. If you see only a short notice, check back in a few days for the expanded version. The funeral home does not always update the original entry. Sometimes they post the full version as a separate page, so your best bet is to search by name directly on the site rather than browsing the homepage listings. Another thing worth knowing is that Olson, like most funeral homes in Wisconsin, does not charge extra for publishing an obituary in the local newspaper as part of their basic packages. Families sometimes assume they will be billed per line or per word, which is true for some larger metro papers but not typically the case here. The word count tends to run between 200 and 400 words for a standard notice. Anything beyond that usually gets edited down by the funeral director before submission, so if length matters to the family, they should let Olson know upfront rather than waiting for the draft to come back trimmed.
If you need records that predate the digital era, going to the Dunn County Register of Deeds or the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison is the route. Olson's own physical files are not publicly accessible, but death certificates are public record in Wisconsin and can be ordered through the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. You need the full name, date of death, and your relationship to the deceased, or a court order if you are not family. Processing usually takes two to three weeks by mail. The main limitation with the online obituary system is that it is not searchable by criteria beyond name. There is no filter for date range, age group, or neighborhood. You have to know who you are looking for. If you are doing genealogical research with only a partial name, the newspaper archive route is your only real option, and even then you are relying on indexed titles which can be incomplete for older issues.
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