How I Use Northcountrynow Obituaries to Find Real Stories
Northcountrynow publishes obituaries daily for people who pass away across northern Vermont and the surrounding region. I started checking them regularly a few years ago after a colleague mentioned their father's name appeared in the Sunday paper. What I found wasn't just death notices - it was a surprisingly detailed archive of local lives that you won't find anywhere else. The process is straightforward but takes some patience. I go to the Northcountrynow website and navigate to the obituaries section. Most people just search by last name, which works fine for the basics. But if you actually want to understand what someone's life looked like, you need to read past the standard template. The interesting details are usually buried in the middle paragraphs where family members or close friends contribute personal anecdotes.
Remembering The Brave Souls Behind Northcountrynow Obituaries Today Uncovering The Lives And Stories Of The Regions Dece
Here is how I approach this systematically. First, I pull up the obituary and note the full name, date of death, and age. Then I search for that name combined with "North Country" or the specific town mentioned. Local historical societies often have newspaper clippings or photographs that predate the current digital archive. I also check the comments section on the website - sometimes former classmates, military comrades, or distant relatives leave memories that filled gaps the family couldn't cover in the official notice. One problem I ran into repeatedly involves name collisions. The name "Robert Chen" is not uncommon in this region, and I spent about forty-five minutes trying to track down the right person once because the obituary didn't list a specific town of residence. My workaround was to cross-reference the listed funeral home address with the person's known workplace from public records. The funeral home was in Burlington while the workplace was in St. Johnsbury, which narrowed it down to three different Robert Chens listed in the area that month. I eliminated two by checking school district records through the state education department's public directory. It took about twenty minutes total once I knew the trick. The real value here is in connecting multiple obituaries to see community patterns. I once noticed that three separate obituaries in the same week all mentioned service in the same Army battalion during the same deployment era. That isn't something you would catch scanning individual notices. The veteran community in this region tends to cluster geographically and temporally, and mapping those connections reveals how tight-knit these small towns actually are.
I have found that reading the older archived obituaries going back five to ten years gives you the best sense of demographic shifts. The median age listed has crept upward noticeably, and the occupational descriptions have shifted from manufacturing and farming to service industry and healthcare. It is not dramatic, but it is honest data that researchers usually overlook because they are looking for official statistics instead of primary sources. There are limitations you should know about. Not everyone who dies in the region gets an obituary on Northcountrynow. Family finances play a role since these notices cost money to publish. Some communities publish through competing local papers, so you might miss someone entirely if you only check one source. I have learned to also monitor the Waterville Union and the Lyndon Village News when I hit dead ends. The coverage overlap is maybe sixty percent, meaning roughly two in five obituaries appear exclusively on a competitor's site. If you are researching a specific person and hitting walls, try searching for their spouse or adult children. Sometimes the obituary appears under a relative's name first, and the decedent is mentioned only as a surviving family member. I found an entire branch of my grandfather's extended family this way after spending three weeks looking for names that kept coming up empty.
Get the Full Details
The downloadable resources on the site are minimal. You can print individual obituaries but there is no bulk export feature. I keep a folder on my desktop organized by month and year with printed copies. For anyone doing serious research, setting up a simple spreadsheet with columns for name, date, age, town, occupation, and notable mentions saves hours compared to flipping through old print editions or browser tabs. I recommend this approach for genealogy work, local history projects, or anyone trying to understand the social fabric of northern Vermont. The information is free and publicly accessible. You just need to treat the obituaries as primary source documents rather than routine news content. That shift in perspective changes everything about what you can find.
