Finding and Using Obituaries at Devargas Funeral Home
I spend a lot of time helping people track down old obituaries or figure out what information is actually available from smaller funeral homes. Devargas Funeral Home in New Mexico handles a lot of rural families in the area, and their online obituary system is decent but not particularly intuitive if you don't know where to look. The obituary section on their website is organized by date of passing, not by last name. When I'm searching for someone, I usually have to scroll through a few weeks of listings if I don't know the exact date. The search function on their site is basically non-existent, so don't bother using it. It'll give you results from the general site, not really the obituaries themselves. Each obituary entry includes the standard details: full name, age, date of passing, surviving family members, and service information. Some of them have a bit more detail about the person's life, but most are pretty template-driven. The funeral home uses a standard format that they fill in, so the depth of information varies depending on what the family provided on their intake form.
Here's the thing most people miss: the PDF versions of obituaries are different from the webpage versions. The printed obituary that families submit to local newspapers often contains additional biographical details, military service information, or church affiliations that don't make it onto the website. If you're doing genealogy research, always try to locate the newspaper version first, then cross-reference with the funeral home listing. I ran into this issue a few years back when a client was looking for their great-uncle who passed in 2019. The online obituary mentioned a brother in Albuquerque but didn't list any sisters. I tracked down the Farmington Dispatch version of the same obituary, and it included two sisters and the name of the elementary school where he taught for thirty years. That school name led directly to a bunch of other records I wouldn't have found otherwise. If you're trying to access older obituaries that might have been removed or archived, you can contact the funeral home directly. Their office number is listed on the main page, and the staff is generally helpful about pulling up records. They keep digitized copies going back quite a few years, probably since they started using their current system around 2015 or so. Before that, it was mostly paper records, though some of those may have been scanned if the family requested digital copies.
There's no free public database or download link for their full obituary archive. You can view the listings online, print individual pages, or call to request copies of older records. Some people use web archives like the Wayback Machine to find obituaries that may have been taken down, but Devargas doesn't seem to have extensive archived versions there either. Most of the older entries just disappear from the active site after a year or two. The obituary submission process itself is straightforward if you're arranging services. The funeral home provides a questionnaire, and you can email or fax the completed form along with any photos you want included. They typically publish the obituary within 24 to 48 hours of receiving it, assuming everything is in order. Rush requests on weekends can sometimes take longer because the staff handling the website updates is smaller during those days. If you're researching family history and hitting dead ends with Devargas records, check the Taos County Clerk's office for death certificates. Those are public records and can fill in gaps that obituaries leave out, especially around cause of death and exact dates. The funeral home obituaries are useful for the narrative details, but they won't replace official documents for anything legal or genealogical.
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