Why These Obituaries Matter More Than You Think
Inman Ward Funeral Home has been operating in the Columbia, South Carolina area for decades, and the obituary records they've accumulated represent something most people don't realize exists: a remarkably detailed social history of a region that rarely gets documented with this level of specificity. I spent roughly three years doing genealogical research that required me to dig through hundreds of these entries, and the stuff you can pull from them goes way beyond names and dates. The basic process of accessing these obituaries is straightforward. Most are published through the funeral home's website or local newspaper archives, and you can search by name, date range, or location. But the actual value comes from understanding how to read between the lines of what's written, and then knowing where to follow up when the obituary itself runs out of information. I learned this the hard way when I was researching a family line that traced back to the 1890s in Richland County. The obituary for a woman named Clara Mae Whitfield gave me a husband's name, three children, and a place of birth, but the dates were conflicting across two different sources. The funeral home's version listed her as born in 1912, while a church record I found later suggested 1908. The workaround I ended up using was tracing the children's own obituaries, which listed their birth years, then working backward to narrow down the window. It took about four hours of cross-referencing, but it resolved the discrepancy. That's the kind of work these records demand.
One thing beginners consistently miss is that Inman Ward's obituaries often include information that isn't explicitly labeled. The denomination of the church, the name of the cemetery, the organization a person belonged to — these details are usually buried in the middle of a paragraph and easy to skim past. I keep a spreadsheet with columns for each of these data points because pulling them out systematically saves enormous time later. Without that structure, you're just reading and hoping something useful sticks. Another counter-intuitive point: the most recent obituaries aren't always the most complete. Inman Ward has used different formatting styles over the years, and the older entries from the 1980s and early 1990s tend to be longer and more detailed because families paid per line or per word and put more content in to justify the cost. The modern obituaries are often shorter, sometimes just a paragraph. If you're researching someone who died after 2005, don't assume there isn't more information elsewhere. Check the microfilm at the Richland County Library. They have the newspaper archives going back further than the digital versions. The main limitation here is access. Not everything is digitized. A significant portion of the pre-1995 records exist only in physical newspaper clippings or on microfilm, which means you either have to visit in person or pay a researcher to pull them for you. I've seen people waste money on automated genealogy services that claim to have these records when they genuinely don't. The digital archive at Inman Ward's site is useful but incomplete, probably covering the last fifteen to twenty years reliably.
If you're serious about this, the best approach is a hybrid one. Start with the online database for the recent deaths to establish your timeline, then move to the county library or the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina for the older materials. The Columbia Telegram and the State newspaper both ran Inman Ward obituaries, and their archives are separate from each other. Cross-referencing both publications often reveals details that appear in one but not the other. I also recommend keeping a log of every search you run, including the date you searched and the source you used. You will forget which version of an obituary you found first, and you'll end up duplicating work or citing the same source twice without realizing it. This sounds trivial until you've spent six weeks tracking a single family line and then discover you'd already found the key document three months earlier and filed it under the wrong name.
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