Writing Obituaries That Actually Get Read
The Shelby Star Newspaper has been running obituaries for a while now, and the process is straightforward if you know what you're doing. You submit a death notice, it gets reviewed, and if it fits their format and length requirements, it runs in print and on their site. That's the basic cycle. People mess it up constantly. When I was putting together my mother-in-law's obituary a few years back, I thought the hardest part would be the writing. It wasn't. The hardest part was figuring out what they'd actually accept and getting the photos right. The Shelby Star requires at least 24 hours turnaround for publication, sometimes longer during holiday weeks. If you're rushing because the funeral is Friday morning, you need to have everything submitted by Tuesday afternoon at the latest. They charge by the line or by the word depending on whether you go with the standard bio format or a longer legacy piece. A basic death notice with name, age, date of death, and surviving family runs around $75 to $120. A full obituary with biographical detail, photos, and service information can run $200 to $400 or more depending on length. Prices change occasionally, so call the paper directly before submitting to confirm current rates. The obituary desk number is listed on their website under the death notices section.
Photos are where most people hit a wall. The Shelby Star accepts digital submissions but has specific requirements. The image needs to be at least 300 DPI at the size it will appear in print, which is usually around 2 inches wide by 3 inches tall for standard obituaries. If you scan an old glossy photo from a frame, don't use your home scanner. Those produce images around 150 DPI max, and the paper will reject them or publish something that looks muddy. I had to drive to a local copy shop and pay $5 to get a proper scan of a photo that was clearly damaged from being kept in a drawer for twenty years. The staff there figured out the contrast issues and gave me a file that actually printed cleanly. Another thing nobody warns you about: spelling. The Shelby Star will print exactly what you submit. If you spell the deceased's name wrong, miss a generation in the surviving family list, or get the service location incorrect, that's what runs. I once saw an obituary where the funeral home name was misspelled, and the family couldn't get a correction printed until the next day's paper. Corrections are not guaranteed. They'll publish one if it's a clear error on their end, but if you submit something wrong, you're usually stuck with it unless you call immediately and they have editorial discretion to fix it before layout. Submitting is done through their online portal or by email if you don't have internet access and need to mail a physical copy. The online form walks you through each section. They ask for the full legal name, date and place of birth, date and place of death, cause of death if you want to include it, survivors and predeceased family members, service details, and a biographical paragraph. There's a character limit per section, so if you write a novel-length life story, it gets cut. Keep the bio to 150 words or less for the standard format, or go longer if you're paying for the extended legacy version.
Surviving family lists follow a standard order: spouse, children, grandchildren, parents, siblings. Predeceased family goes in a separate sentence. Don't try to reinvent the order. The typesetter will rearrange it anyway, and you'll just waste time arguing about whether great-nieces and nephews come before or after second cousins. The biggest mistake I see people make is waiting too long to submit. Death certificates take time to process, and funeral homes often don't have the final details like burial location or visitation times until the day before the service. The Shelby Star accepts obituaries without complete service information and lets you update it later, but there's a cutoff. After 5 PM on the day before publication, updates stop. If your uncle dies on a Thursday and the funeral is Saturday, you have a narrow window to get everything right. Some people also include donation requests, which is fine and common. The paper will print "In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to..." followed by the organization name and address. Don't put a GoFundMe link or a personal Venmo address. They reject those. Stick to registered 501(c)(3) organizations with physical addresses.
Get the Full Details
If you're doing this for someone who lived a long life with an extensive family, the biographical paragraph is where it gets tricky. You want to capture who they were without turning it into a resume. List the things that actually defined them. A teacher who retired after 35 years doesn't need every school district she worked at. She needed the one sentence that explains why people remember her. I wrote three versions of my mother-in-law's bio and showed them to her sister, who pointed out that I'd left out the only thing her friends actually talked about: the fact that she answered every phone call, even at midnight. That's the line that stayed. There's no editing pass after submission unless you catch it before the deadline. Proofread twice. Then have someone else proofread it once. Then read it aloud to catch awkward phrasing. The last thing a grieving family needs is to see a typo in the one public document about their loss. The Shelby Star is a smaller regional paper, so their obituary section isn't as large as the big city dailies. You might share a page with other local papers' death notices. That means your piece gets less visibility than it would in a metro paper, but it also means less competition for attention from families who want something sensational. These obituaries tend to be respectful and functional, which is usually what people want anyway.
If you need to check whether an obituary has been published, the Shelby Star posts them online the same day as print, usually by 6 AM. You can search by name on their website. There's no notification system unless you set one up through their newsletter or follow their social media, which I wouldn't recommend just for obituary tracking. The online archive is searchable and stays up indefinitely, which matters if you need to pull a copy for genealogical research or legal purposes down the road. The whole process takes about 30 to 45 minutes if you have the information ready. Most of that time is spent writing and revising the biographical paragraph. The submission itself is quick. The portal accepts your text, photo, and payment in one go. You get a confirmation email within an hour, and if there's a problem with your submission, they call or email you before publication. Don't ignore that call. If they say your photo is too low resolution or your text exceeds the limit, fix it and resubmit the same day. I've also seen people try to bundle multiple obituaries for the same family into one submission to save money. The Shelby Star allows this if all the deaths occurred within the same family unit and the same timeframe, but it has to be clearly laid out with each person's details separate. Mixed submissions where you combine unrelated people get rejected or separated by the typesetter, and you might end up paying for two publications anyway. Just submit them separately from the start if they're not related.
One final thing: keep a copy of everything you submit. The paper retains archives, but if you need to reference specific details later or provide proof of publication for insurance or estate purposes, having your own copy saves you a call to the office. Print the confirmation email, save the final file, and note the publication date. It takes thirty seconds and prevents headaches months down the line.
