Valley Funeral Home Obituary Archive: What I Learned After Ten Years
I started helping Valley Funeral Home digitize their records in 2014. The project took longer than expected, mostly because I didn't account for how handwritten entries from the 1970s varied in format. Each obituary card was different. Some used pencil. Others used fountain pen that had bled through the paper. The ink colors ranged from black to blue to what looked like sepia when you held it up to light. The process I eventually settled on involved scanning at 600 DPI in color, then running OCR, then manually correcting any names or dates that came back wrong. I kept a spreadsheet tracking corrections. Out of about 2,400 records I processed, roughly 18% had OCR errors significant enough to require manual fixing. Most errors were in dates, especially ones written as Roman numerals or abbreviations like "Sept" instead of "September".
Remembering Our Community A Valuable History Of Obituaries From Valley Funeral Home
That archive they maintain isn't just a list of names and dates. It captures local history in a way census records don't. You can trace migration patterns by looking at where people were born versus where they died. The 1950s entries show families moving into the valley after the highway expansion. By 1962, obituaries started mentioning "returning to their hometown" more frequently, which correlated with retirement migration patterns I saw in county records. I found a specific edge case that took me three days to resolve. An obituary from March 1978 listed a death date of "3-15-78" but the funeral was scheduled for the 17th. Standard practice would have you assume the death occurred on the 15th, but when I called the family for clarification, they explained the person had actually died on the morning of the 16th. The date on the card was a clerical error made by the undertaker who was working a double shift that week. My workaround was to cross-reference with the cemetery plot record, which had the actual interment date. That gave me the correct death date to within a day. Now I always check plot records when funeral dates and obituary dates don't align logically. It usually adds about five minutes per record, but it prevents publishing incorrect information.
How the Obits Actually Work in Practice
Most people think obituaries are just announced after someone dies. They're not. Valley Funeral Home typically begins drafting them two to three days before publication. The family provides basic information, then the obit writer expands it with biographical details from public records and previous family histories on file. I've seen cases where a third obituary referenced a second obituary from five years earlier, creating continuity across generations that researchers find invaluable. The writing style has shifted noticeably over the decades. Pre-1980 obits followed a strict template: survived by, preceded in death by, service details, donations requested. Post-1990 entries became more narrative. Someone might have included their hobby, their favorite church song, even a short anecdote about their grandkids. This stylistic change reflects broader cultural shifts in how we discuss death, but it also makes modern obits harder to parse systematically if you're doing quantitative analysis. Here's a counter-intuitive insight most beginners miss: the most useful obits aren't necessarily the longest ones. A concise 1985 entry from Valley Funeral Home listed just the essentials and mentioned the person was a "veteran, WWII." That single descriptor let me connect them to military records and pull their service history from the National Archives. A longer 2003 obit with three paragraphs of personal anecdotes gave me almost nothing for genealogical research beyond confirming the death date.
Get the Full Details
Another nuance involves the difference between "preceded in death by" and "survived by" sections. The preceded section is often more accurate because it's verified through death certificates. The survived section sometimes lists living relatives who may have moved away or been estranged. I found one case where an obit listed a surviving spouse who had actually divorced three years earlier. The family hadn't updated the contact information with the funeral home.
Common Mistakes When Using This Archive
People assume all Valley Funeral Home records are complete. They're not. The home closed its original location in 2001 and moved to a new facility. Records from the first decade at the new location are missing approximately 15% of expected entries, likely because some families chose different providers during the transition period. If you're researching someone who died between January 2001 and December 2002, check multiple sources before concluding the record doesn't exist. Another frequent error involves date formatting. Pre-1990 entries sometimes used the European format with day before month, especially in handwritten sections. I misread "5/5/45" as May 5th when it was actually May 5th the same year, but once I encountered "12/3/60" that clearly couldn't be December 3rd given the seasonal reference to "summer storms," I realized some entries used month/day/year while others used day/month/year without any indicator. The limitation I find most frustrating is the lack of standardized indexing. Each obit writer had their own filing system. Some organized chronologically. Others alphabetically by last name. A few mixed both methods depending on the season. This means searching the archive requires checking multiple locations for the same time period. I've spent entire afternoons looking for a single 1973 obit that was filed under both the deceased person's name and their spouse's married name.
If your research involves someone who died before 1950, be aware that approximately 30% of those records were lost during a flood in 1955 that damaged the original building's basement storage. The funeral home's insurance covered rebuilding, but personal papers and early record cards weren't replaced. County probate records and newspaper archives fill some gaps, but they don't contain the same biographical details found in complete obituaries.
What I Wish I Knew Before Starting
The biggest time sink I encountered was verifying maiden names in married women's obituaries. Pre-1970 entries typically listed women as "Mrs. John Smith" with no mention of their birth surname. I spent weeks calling relatives and checking marriage licenses before developing a system to flag these records for follow-up research. Now I allocate an extra ten minutes per female obit pre-1970 to note which ones require additional investigation. Another lesson involved the difference between obituary content and actual death certificate information. The obits sometimes softened details about cause of death or omitted information about institutional deaths. I found one case where the obit mentioned "after a long illness" but the death certificate listed a specific occupational disease related to local mining work. This discrepancy mattered for family health history research and workers compensation claims. The most valuable technique I developed was creating a cross-reference map linking obituary mentions to other local records. When an obit mentioned "member of the First Baptist Church," I could search church records for baptism dates and family connections. When it listed "retired from Valley Coal Company," I could access employment records for work history and union membership. These connections transformed isolated death notices into connected family histories spanning multiple generations.
I still encounter challenges with illegible handwriting in older entries. The 1940s cards were written in cursive that many contemporary readers can't decipher. I learned to compare letter forms across multiple entries by the same writer, which helped me develop a personal cipher for common abbreviations and stylistic quirks. This skill developed over about eighteen months of daily practice and now allows me to read most pre-1950 entries without assistance.
