How to Research and Access Obituaries in Ozaukee and Washington Counties, Wisconsin
Most people looking for obituary records in the Ozaukee and Washington County area of Wisconsin end up visiting the same handful of sources. The local newspapers, funeral home websites, and the county clerk's genealogy section. It is not complicated, but it takes some patience if you want accurate information rather than incomplete snippets. I spent several years helping families track down death records and obituary notices for relatives who lived in places like Port Washington, Slinger, and Germantown. What I learned was that the best approach depends entirely on what you are actually looking for. Different sources serve different purposes.
Ozaukee Washington County Obituaries Honoring Lives And Connecting Communities Through Legacy
The obituaries themselves function as community records more than anything else. They tell you who died, when, where the service was held, and who survived. For genealogy research, they are often the first place people look because they bundle multiple details into a single notice. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel still publishes obituaries for Ozaukee County residents, and the Washington County Times does the same for its area. Both have online archives that go back roughly five to ten years depending on the publication. Funeral homes are another major source. Klement Funeral Home in Port Washington and Gerhardt Funeral Home in Menomonee Falls both maintain online obituary pages. These tend to be more detailed than newspaper notices because the families submit them directly. I once had a case where the newspaper version of an obituary listed a surviving daughter as "Mary Johnson" when her actual married name was Mary Kowalski. The funeral home version had the correct name. Always check both if you need accuracy for legal or genealogical purposes.
Where to Find Older Records
For obituaries beyond the online archive range of the local papers, you have a few options. The Ozaukee County Historical Society in Slinger holds microfilm and printed copies of the Ozaukee County Star and other regional publications. Their reading room is open weekdays from nine to four, and you can request copies of specific pages for a small fee. Washington County has a similar arrangement through the Washington County Historical Society in West Bend. Cemetery records are useful when obituary notices are missing or incomplete. The Washington County Register of Deeds maintains burial records that cross-reference names with dates and plot locations. These are public records, but they require an in-person visit or a mailed request with a copy of your ID. I found that the online index through the county's GIS mapping system was faster for basic lookups, though it sometimes had typos in the date of death fields. A quick verification against the funeral home website usually caught the errors.
Get the Full Details
What Most People Miss
One thing that catches people off guard is that not all deaths result in a published obituary. Some families choose not to publish one, or they publish a brief death notice instead of a full obituary. A death notice is just a sentence or two. An obituary is a longer piece that includes biographical details. The distinction matters if you are doing serious genealogy work because the shorter version may omit crucial information like military service, organizational memberships, or the names of predeceased siblings. Another overlooked source is the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison. They accept obituary submissions from across the state, including Ozaukee and Washington Counties. The archives there go back further than the local papers in some cases because families from smaller communities sometimes submit to the statewide paper for broader visibility. This is particularly common among veterans and members of large family networks who want distant relatives to see the notice.
A Practical Workaround for Specific Problems
I ran into a situation a couple of years ago where a woman in her seventies needed to verify that her mother had actually been listed in an obituary for a Social Security benefit claim. The local newspaper archive online only went back to 2010, and her mother had died in 2007. The funeral home website had been redesigned and the old pages were gone. I checked the Ozaukee County Historical Society and found the microfilm copy of the Ozaukee County Star from that month. It took about twenty minutes to locate the page and another ten to photocopy the relevant section. The total cost was four dollars for the copy fee. Without the historical society, we would have had to request the record through the county clerk's office, which takes about two weeks by mail. Here is the workaround that saved time in that case: call the historical society first and ask whether they have the specific date range on microfilm. If they do, you can request a copy by email or phone without visiting. They usually respond within a day or two. If the paper is too damaged or the microfilm is not indexed, then you move to the county clerk. The process is the same for Washington County records, though their response times tend to be slightly slower during the summer months when staff coverage is reduced.
Limitations You Should Know About
Obituaries are not comprehensive legal documents. They contain information submitted by families or funeral directors, which means errors are possible and corrections are rare. Once a newspaper publishes an obituary, amending it requires a written request and usually a fee. Some publications will run a brief correction in a subsequent issue, but many do not. If you need an error fixed, contact the funeral home that prepared the notice first. They sometimes have the authority to issue a corrected version to the paper. The online archives of local newspapers are also incomplete. They typically cover only the digital era of publication, which for these Wisconsin papers started around 2005 to 2010. Anything before that exists only on microfilm or in printed archives. The digital versions are easier to search, but searching a newspaper's online archive for a name that appeared in print only will return nothing. Always verify whether the paper has digitized its full archive or only a portion of it. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has digitized back to about 2008. Regional weeklies like the Ozaukee County Star have much sparser coverage. If you are doing genealogy research and need death records beyond what obituaries provide, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services maintains a statewide death index that is publicly accessible. It includes name, date of death, county of death, and a reference number for ordering a certified copy. This is not the same as an obituary but serves a similar purpose when you need to confirm that a death occurred and when and where it happened. The online lookup is free, and a certified copy runs about twenty-five dollars per certificate.
