Shreveport Times Obituaries Shreveport La The Hidden Truth

Shreveport Times Obituaries: What Actually Happens Behind the Paywall

The Shreveport Times runs one of the largest obituary sections in Louisiana, and most people treat it like a simple lookup tool. It isn't. I've spent years pulling records from the Barksdale area to Bossier Parish, and there are layers to this that nobody talks about unless you've actually filed a Freedom of Information request withKGW or worked through the microfilm archives at the Caddo Parish Library. Most funeral homes file their obituaries through a third-party aggregator called Tribute Catalog, which is owned by GateHouse Media, the same parent company behind Gannett's local paper group. That means the text you see online is often not what actually ran in print. I learned this the hard way in 2022 when I was researching a case involving a deceased veteran who served at nearby Barksdale Air Force Base. The online version listed his rank as Sergeant first class, but the printed obituary from the Times showed he had been a Master Sergeant. The discrepancy came from the funeral home filling out the online form quickly, probably tired after a long day, and not double checking the military records before submission. Here's how the actual process works. Funeral directors submit the obituary through the digital portal. The paper version goes through the editor's desk, where they may cut or rephrase content for space. But the digital version, which is what 90 percent of people ever see, stays exactly as the funeral home wrote it. There is no secondary fact check by the newspaper staff for most entries. I've seen misspelled names, incorrect dates of birth, and even entirely wrong cities of residence that nobody caught.

If you are doing genealogy work or legal research, here is the practical workflow I use. First, pull the obituary from the Shreveport Times website and note the exact phrasing and any discrepancies. Second, check the Barksdale base chapel records if the person was military connected. Third, look at the Caddo Parish Clerk of Court death certificates because those are public record and often have more accurate information than any obituary. I typically cross-reference all three before trusting a single source. This usually takes me about 45 minutes per record, compared to maybe five minutes if you just trust the first thing you find online. The real hidden layer involves the archive gap. The Shreveport Times only keeps full digital obituary records going back to about 2015. Before that, you are dealing with either microfilm at the Central Louisiana Regional Library system or paywalled genealogy databases like Ancestry.com and Fold3. I encountered a specific problem last year where a person died in 2008, and their obituary was mentioned in the Times but the actual text was gone from the digital archive. The only copy I could find was a scanned newspaper page on Newspapers.com, and even that was missing the bottom quarter of the page. The workaround was filing a records request directly with the Times newsroom archive department, which took three weeks and cost nothing, but they sent me a scanned PDF of the actual printed page. I wish I had known about that option sooner. Another thing people miss is that obituaries from the Shreveport Times are frequently syndicated to the Lafayette Daily Advertiser and the Monroe News Star through the Advance Local network. If you are searching for a relative who may have moved around North Louisiana, checking just the Shreveport Times will give you an incomplete picture. I had a case where the obituary text differed slightly between the Times version and the Monroe version because each paper made minor edits for their respective audiences.

The subscription wall is also worth noting. The Times allows free access to some obituary content, but full access requires a digital subscription that runs about fifteen dollars a month. I find it cheaper and faster to just go to the library with a microfilm reader or use the state archive databases if you have institutional access through a university. The information is the same, you just avoid the paywall entirely. One more nuance that nobody mentions. Obituaries in the Shreveport Times are not just newspaper content, they are also submitted to social security death index databases and state vital records through automated feeds from the National Death Index. This means the information in the obituary can end up on government records if the funeral director does not carefully review what gets transmitted. I worked on a probate case where a deceased person's middle initial was recorded differently across three sources, and it delayed the estate settlement by six months because the probate court required exact matches on name documentation. For anyone actually trying to use these records effectively, my recommendation is straightforward. Always verify the basic facts against the death certificate first. Treat the obituary as a supplementary source, not the primary authority. And if you hit a wall with the online archive, email the Times newsroom directly and ask for their archive department contact. Most people never do that, and they miss the entire pre-2015 backfile that exists in paper form but not on their website.