A Practical Look at Publishing Obituaries Through Seacoastonline
If you're trying to get an obituary placed for someone in the Portsmouth or Hampton area, you've probably run into seacoastonline.com by now. Their obituary section handles both paid death notices and full-length obituaries that families or funeral homes submit through their system. The platform itself is straightforward, but there are a few things that trip people up if you've never done this before. Here's how the process actually works from submission to publication. Families or funeral directors create an account through the Seacoast's obituary portal, which is powered by a third-party memorial services provider. You fill out the form with the deceased's full name, date of death, age, surviving family members, service details, and a biography section. The biography is where most people struggle because they either write too little or turn it into a resume. I remember helping a client publish an obituary for a woman who'd been a school cafeteria worker for forty years. The original draft listed her as a "retired food services professional." We changed it to say she fed thousands of kids over four decades and that nobody left her lunch line hungry. That one sentence made the difference between a generic notice and something people actually read.
Once the form is submitted, you choose between a basic death notice and a full obituary. Death notices are shorter, cheaper, and mostly just state the facts. Full obituaries run longer and often include photos. The cost depends on length and whether you include a photo. As of the last time I checked, a standard death notice runs around a hundred dollars, while a full obituary with a photo can push past two hundred depending on word count. The biggest issue people encounter is the approval process. Seacoast does run submissions through an editor before they go live. This usually takes one to two business days, but it can stretch longer if your submission has issues like incorrect dates, misspelled names, or family member listings that look inaccurate. I've had clients resubmit because they listed a spouse as "survived by" when that person had predeceased the deceased. The editor catches that stuff, but it adds a day or two to publication. Another edge case that catches people off guard: if you want changes after publication, you can't just edit the live page. You have to contact the obituary team directly, and there may be a fee for revisions. I once worked with a family that needed to correct a service time two days after the obituary went live. They had to call the newspaper's obituary desk, explain the error, and pay a small amendment fee. It was thirty dollars and took about ten minutes of phone tag to resolve.
Photos are where most submissions get held up. The system accepts JPEG and PNG files, but the resolution needs to be decent. I've seen submissions rejected because the photo was a blurry phone scan of a printed picture. Use a clear digital image, ideally at least six hundred pixels wide. The file also needs to be under ten megabytes, which trips people up who try to upload high-resolution photos straight from a camera. For people who want more control over the layout and length, the full obituary option gives you more room. You can include church names, burial locations, donations information, and links to memorial websites or tribute funds. The donation request is important to get right because if you list a charity, that information stays online permanently as part of the archive. I've seen cases where families listed a charity that later merged or changed its name, and the outdated info remained visible. If you're handling this for someone who isn't tech-savvy, the best approach is to gather all the information before you sit down at the computer. Have the full legal name, dates of birth and death, maiden names, names of surviving siblings and their spouses, grandchildren counts, education, military service details, and service information all ready. Try to have a photo selected and accessible before you start the form. Rushing through the entry while juggling these details usually leads to mistakes that require corrections later.
Get the Full Details
The obituaries stay on the site indefinitely, which is different from print newspapers where notices disappear after the publication date. That permanence is valuable for preserving family history, but it also means you should double-check everything before submitting. There's no undo button once it goes live beyond requesting a manual edit. If the Seacoast platform doesn't work for your situation, a few alternative options exist. You can publish directly through funeral home websites that often syndicate to local papers. Some families use memorial sites like ForeverRemembered or Legacy.com, which have broader distribution but less regional specificity. For the Seacoast area specifically, sticking with the local paper's online platform tends to reach the right audience.
