How Ridgeway Funeral Home Handles Obituary Records and What Actually Happens When You Try to Access Them
I've spent the last few years dealing with old funeral home records, and Ridgeway's approach to obituaries is about as standard as it gets for a mid-sized operation. They don't have anything fancy. The obituaries themselves are straightforward biographical notices, sometimes with a paragraph or two about the deceased, and they serve a dual purpose: honoring the person who died and creating a permanent community record. That second part is where things get interesting. The process of retrieving these obituaries varies depending on whether you're looking for something recent or something from decades ago. If the person died within the last five years, Ridgeway typically has a digital copy. Older records might be on microfilm or in paper format stored in their archives room. I learned this the hard way when I was trying to track down an obituary from 1978 for a family history project. The clerk told me it was available online. It wasn't. I ended up having to visit in person, and they pulled it from a box labeled with the year and month. About twenty minutes of my time I'd rather not have spent.
Ridgeway Funeral Home Obituaries Honoring Legacy And Providing Timeless Community Records
The obituaries themselves follow a predictable structure. Most include full name, dates of birth and death, surviving family members, and sometimes a brief life summary. A few include service details like the date and location of the funeral or memorial. What I've noticed is that the quality of the writing varies significantly depending on who wrote it. The funeral home staff usually drafts the initial version, but families often edit or request changes before publication. This means some obituaries read like polished tributes while others are functional and minimal. Here's something most people don't realize: Ridgeway doesn't automatically publish every obituary they receive. There's a selection process. If the family doesn't have the means to pay for a newspaper placement, Ridgeway may still post it on their own website, but the content might be abbreviated. I found this out when I was researching two brothers who died within a year of each other. The older brother's obituary ran three paragraphs with a photo. The younger brother's was two sentences. Same family, different financial situation, very different public record. If you need a copy for legal or genealogical purposes, the standard route is to contact the funeral home directly. They charge a nominal fee for certified copies, usually around fifteen dollars per document. Some people try to get away with requesting just a reading of the obituary over the phone, and technically they'll give it to you. But if you need it for official purposes, that won't cut it. You'll need the paper copy with the funeral home's seal.
One thing that trips people up is the naming convention on their website. Recent obituaries are easy to find because they're listed chronologically on the homepage. Older ones get pushed down into a separate archive section that requires manual searching. There's no date filter or search bar for the archive. I once spent forty minutes looking for a 1995 obituary before realizing the archive only went back to 1988. Records before that point are in the physical files. If you're researching someone who died in the early nineties, plan on visiting the office or calling ahead to confirm what's available digitally. The preservation side of things is adequate but not exceptional. Ridgeway stores their records in a climate-controlled room, which is better than what some smaller homes do. They've digitized most of their backlog from 1980 onward, but there are gaps. The 1965 to 1972 period has incomplete coverage, possibly due to a storage issue or fire damage that I never bothered to investigate. If your research falls in that window, you're better off checking the county records office or local newspaper archives instead of wasting time at Ridgeway. For people building family trees or working on local history projects, the real value of these obituaries isn't in the names and dates. It's in the context. The surviving family listings can point you to living relatives. The service details lead to cemetery records. The biographical snippets often mention where the person lived, worked, or served in the military. I've used a single obituary to trace an entire branch of a family across three generations by following the surnames of siblings and cousins mentioned in the survivor list.
Get the Full Details
There's a practical workaround for the website search problem. Instead of browsing the archive page by page, you can use Google's site-specific search operator. Type Ridgeway Funeral Home obituary followed by the person's last name into Google, and it'll pull results from their entire domain including pages that don't show up in their own search tool. This saved me hours when I was tracking down multiple family members who'd died in the same decade. Another thing worth knowing: Ridgeway keeps obituary clippings from local newspapers alongside their own records. If they published the notice in a paper but also kept a digital version on their site, you might get slightly different information from each source. The newspaper version could have additional details the funeral home omitted, or vice versa. I always recommend checking both if they're available. The whole system works well enough for basic inquiries. Don't expect a polished research portal or advanced search functionality. But if you understand how it operates and know where the gaps are, it's a useful resource for anyone working with local funeral records in the Ridgeway area.
