How to Research and Preserve Obituaries From Morgantons Premier Funeral Home
When you're trying to piece together the history of a small North Carolina city, obituaries are often the only detailed public record that captures a person's life. Morganton sits in Burke County, and Premier Funeral Home has been around long enough to have handled deaths going back decades. If you're doing genealogy work, local history research, or just trying to remember who people were, here's how to actually get something useful out of this process. I started working with Morganton obituaries about six years ago when my grandmother asked me to find out more about her late husband's former neighbors. What I quickly learned is that Premier Funeral Home doesn't publish archives online. Their website is basically a contact form and service description. The actual obituaries live in three places: the local newspaper archives, physical copies at the funeral home, and family-maintained scrapbooks that occasionally surface at estate sales or through word of mouth. The newspaper route is your best starting point. The Morganton News Herald runs obituaries daily, and their digital archive goes back to around 2010. Before that, you're dealing with print microfilm at the Burke County Public Library. I spent an afternoon there last year looking up a series of deaths from 1998 to 2002, and the microfilm reader ate up about two hours for roughly forty obituaries. Factor in the time it takes to transcribe legible notes from faded print, and you're looking at maybe sixty obituaries per full workday if you're working efficiently.
For older records before digitization, the Burke County Register of Deeds office maintains death certificates that sometimes reference the funeral home that handled arrangements. These aren't obituaries in the traditional sense, but they'll tell you the date of death, the surviving family members, and occasionally the occupation and residence. A death certificate from 1987 I pulled for a client listed the deceased as a foreman at a local textile mill and named three children still living in Burke County. That kind of detail doesn't show up in most newspaper sketches. Here's where most people run into trouble. Premier Funeral Home's own records are not publicly accessible. You can call and ask, and they will sometimes share basic information if you're a next-of-kin or have a documented legitimate reason. I learned this the hard way when I tried to request records for a historian writing a book about Burke County's civic leaders in the 1970s. The receptionist told me flatly they don't release files without a court order or proof of direct familial relationship. No arguments, no exceptions posted on their website, just a phone call away. The workaround I ended up using was indirect. I tracked down the obituaries through the newspaper, identified the families mentioned in those notices, and then reached out to living relatives through social media or public directory searches. Two of those families had kept the original funeral home pamphlets and memorial cards. One family actually had a folder with correspondence from Premier Funeral Home that included pricing from 1974. That folder ended up being more valuable than any official record I could have requested directly.
When you're compiling notable figures, you need to define what notable means in a town of about 22,000 people. It's not about fame in the national sense. It's about people who held positions in local government, ran businesses that shaped the community, coached high school sports for decades, or were involved in church organizations that anchored neighborhood life. I keep a running spreadsheet with columns for name, date of death, approximate age, employer or primary role, surviving family, and where the obituary can be found. After about a year of this, the spreadsheet started showing patterns that weren't visible any other way. A cluster of textile worker deaths in the early 1990s. A gap in records from 2003 to 2005 where several elderly residents died and the newspaper barely covered them. Those gaps are usually the most interesting parts. One pitfall worth noting is that obituaries from Premier Funeral Home, like most funeral homes, follow a template. They list the surviving family, the service details, and sometimes a brief biography. What they almost never include is the full scope of a person's life. A woman might have been a union organizer, a volunteer at the food bank, and the first in her family to graduate high school, but the obituary might mention none of that. The details are in cemetery records, library files, personal papers, and oral histories from people who actually knew the deceased. Don't treat the obituary as the primary source. Treat it as a starting point. If you're doing this research seriously, I'd recommend setting up a physical filing system alongside the digital one. Scan every obituary you find, yes, but also keep the printed clippings. Scans degrade in quality over time, and some of the finer details in older print issues are easier to read on the actual paper. I have a box of Morganton obituary clippings from 1960 to 1990 that I've never fully digitized because the microfilm copies from the library were too blurry to scan cleanly. The originals are in acid-free sleeves in my basement, and I pull from them when the digital files don't cut it.
Get the Full Details
The limitations are real. You won't get everything. Some families chose cremation and minimal services, which means shorter or absent obituaries. Others moved away and the death was reported in a different county or state. Premier Funeral Home handled cases across Burke County and into neighboring Caldwell County, so you may need to expand your search radius depending on where the person lived rather than where they died. I once spent three weeks tracking down an obituary that turned out to be filed under a funeral home in Hickory instead, even though the deceased had lived in Morganton his entire life. For anyone just getting started, the Burke County Public Library's local history desk is the single most useful resource. The librarian who handles that section knows which boxes are still unprocessed, which microfilm reels are missing, and which estate sale last month had a folder of old funeral programs. She doesn't keep a formal index, but she keeps things in her head. That's worth more than any database.
