Reading and Understanding Ricketson Funeral Home Obituaries
Most people click on a local obituary and skim past the service details. The real value is in the small print. Ricketson Funeral Home has been publishing these for decades, and if you know where to look, they contain genealogical breadcrumbs that mainstream databases miss entirely. I spent years compiling death records for a county history project, and Ricketson's archives turned out to be one of the more useful sources we found. The format is consistent enough to parse, but inconsistent enough that you have to pay attention. The obituaries run on the Ricketson Funeral Home website, usually updated within 24 hours of the family submitting them. They also appear in the local newspaper's obituary section. Here is the thing most people overlook: the web versions often include a slightly longer biographical paragraph than the print version. Print space is limited. The online copies tend to have the fuller story, including volunteer work, organizational memberships, and surviving relatives that wouldn't fit in the paper layout. I once tracked down a great-uncle's military service details by comparing the two versions. The print obit mentioned he was a veteran. The web version named the unit and the campaigns he served in. That is the actual purpose behind how these are written and shared. They are not just announcements. They are community records. The funeral home understands that this town leans on itself, and the obituaries reflect that. You will see references to people who held the same position for thirty years, who coached the same youth league, who showed up at the same church every Sunday. It builds a picture of how the community actually functions. When you read through a month's worth, you start seeing the same names recurring across different families, which tells you more about local social structure than any census data ever could.
Ricketson's obituaries follow a fairly standard template, but there are enough variations to cause headaches if you are trying to extract data systematically. The typical structure runs like this: full name, age, date of death, a biographical paragraph covering birthplace and education, a list of surviving family members with their locations, and service details. Sometimes the survivors are listed in order of relationship. Sometimes they are alphabetical. I have seen both approaches within the same week. Here is a practical tip for anyone trying to compile this information: use a simple spreadsheet. Columns for name, date of death, spouse, children, parents, siblings, and location notes. It takes about ten minutes per entry if you are fast. Two minutes if you only care about the core genealogical data and skip the service details. I used a script once to auto-pull the text from the website, but the formatting was too inconsistent to rely on. Manual entry was faster in the long run because I could flag the ambiguous cases and cross-reference them later.
Common Problems and Workarounds
The biggest issue I ran into was name ambiguity. This is a mid-sized community, and you will see the same three or four common names appear repeatedly over a single year. John Smith. Mary Johnson. There is no middle initial in most entries. What I ended up doing was using the service date and location as disambiguation anchors. Ricketson includes the church or venue name, and in this area the major churches are small enough that narrowing it down to a specific congregation and a specific Tuesday service cut the false matches almost entirely. It is not perfect. I still had to manually verify about fifteen percent of my matches against census records. Another issue: some older obituaries on the site are scanned PDFs rather than plain text. The search function does not index them properly. If you are researching someone who died before roughly 2015, you may need to manually open the PDF and copy the text yourself. It is a minor inconvenience, but it adds up if you are processing hundreds of entries.
Get the Full Details
What Beginners Miss About These Records
People tend to treat obituaries as secondary sources. They are not. In many rural and semi-rural communities, the obituary is the most complete publicly available summary of a person's life at the time of death. Birth certificates have gaps. Census records are decennial and sparse. An obituary from Ricketson will often list every child's name and current address, which is gold for mapping family connections. The counter-intuitive part is that you should treat the obit as your primary source for immediate family structure, then use it to guide your search for birth and marriage records, not the other way around. Also, pay attention to the \"predeceased by\" section. Many people skip it, but it tells you which relatives have already died. That is useful for ruling out living relatives when you are trying to identify surviving siblings or cousins. It sounds obvious, but most people do not use it that way.
Limits and When to Look Elsewhere
These obituaries are not a complete record. Ricketson handles a significant share of local funerals, but not all. Some families choose smaller funeral homes or direct cremation without a formal obituary. The website does not archive every single one going back indefinitely. I have hit dead ends where the family requested no public notice, and there is nothing to find. If you are doing serious research, you need to supplement with the county clerk's death certificates and the state vital records office. Those are slower to access but more comprehensive for legal lineage. There is also a privacy issue worth noting. Recent obituaries tend to be more detailed because families want to share information. Older ones, especially from before the digital era, are sometimes thinner. A death from 1987 might have a single paragraph and a list of survivors. A death from 2023 might fill half a screen. Do not assume the difference reflects the importance of the person. It reflects how much the family wanted to publish at the time. If you are looking for something quick, the website is fine. If you are building a research project or trying to verify family ties across multiple generations, plan on spending a weekend cross-referencing everything. The information is there, but it is not going to hand itself to you.
