How to Actually Find Salt Lake City Obituaries Without Wasting Hours
The Deseret News runs the largest obituary section in Utah, and if you just click through their site like a normal person, you will lose somewhere between twenty minutes and an hour before you actually find what you need. I spent about three weeks last winter tracking down records for a family member and ended up with a much better handle on how this thing works than I had when I started. Start at deseretnews.com/obituaries. There is a search bar at the top. Put in the last name. Filter by county if you want to narrow it down — Salt Lake County covers most of what you are looking for. The results page will show recent deaths listed first, usually within a day or two of publication. Older obituaries do not disappear. They just sink below the fold and you have to dig for them. The Deseret News archive goes back to about 2010 on their public site. Before that you hit a wall unless you have a library card for the Utah Digital Newspapers project or you go through the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, which has microfilm and digital versions going back much further. That is the single biggest gap most people run into. They find a death index from 2008, try to read the actual obituary, and hit a paywall or a broken link.
The actual obituary content itself is usually formatted the same way across the board. Name, age, date of death, a short biography, surviving family members, and funeral home details. Some are full-length pieces written by the family. Some are three paragraphs and a photo. You cannot reliably predict which you are going to get until you open it. Here is a workaround that saved me a lot of time. When I was looking for my great aunt, I kept hitting articles that were technically filed under her name but were actually about her husband, who shared the same last name. The search function does not distinguish between the subject of the obituary and family members mentioned inside it. I started using the date range filter combined with the first name field and cross-referencing the funeral home location. She used two different funeral homes over twelve years because her family moved from the east side to the west side of the valley, and that detail was the only thing that confirmed I was looking at the right person every time. If you need records older than 2010, the Deseret News does not give you free access to those. You can call their archives department at 801-748-2111 and ask for a copies request. They charge about fifteen dollars per obituary for a PDF copy, and turnaround is typically two to three business days. It is not fast, but it works when the online archive does not have what you need.
Another thing nobody mentions: the Deseret News occasionally merges duplicate entries. If a person died, had an obituary published, and then a death anniversary notice ran six months later, those sometimes appear as one combined article rather than two separate ones. This means searching by exact date range without accounting for merged entries can make you think an obituary is missing when it is just attached to another article. For genealogy research specifically, the Utah Genealogical Association maintains a death index that is more complete than anything you will find through the newspaper site. It is not free, but the cost is reasonable and the coverage goes back to the 1900s for many counties including Salt Lake. If you are building a family tree or doing serious research, this is the resource that actually matters. The Deseret News app is fine for quick lookups. It is terrible for anything involving bulk searches or date range filtering. I tried pulling obituaries for twelve people across a six month period using the app and gave up after four. The web version with its advanced filters is significantly faster for that kind of work.
Get the Full Details
One last practical note. If you are trying to find whether someone died but you only have their first name and an approximate year, you will have mixed results. The Deseret News requires a last name for any meaningful search. Without it, you are just scrolling through hundreds of entries manually, and nobody has the patience for that. In those cases, the county clerk's death records office is a better starting point even though the process is slower. You file a formal request and wait a week for results, but the data is cleaner and the search parameters are more flexible. The whole system works if you know where the seams are. Most people do not. That is why the process feels harder than it actually is once you figure out the patterns.
