What You Actually Get When You Look Up Snyder Crissman Funeral Home Obituaries Honoring Local Lives With Dignified Digital Archives
Their online archive is one of the better-maintained local funeral home digital record systems I've had to deal with. Not perfect, but functional. The site hosts obituaries going back roughly fifteen years, and the search interface actually works without throwing a 404 every other query. When you pull up a record, you get the standard biographical text, sometimes a photo, and occasionally the service details. That last part is hit or miss depending on when the obituary was originally posted. I spent about six months ago tracking down a great-uncle's service information for a family gathering. His obituary was from 2008, and the entry had been migrated from their old CMS to the current platform during a site rebuild. The text was intact but the original photo link was broken. The family expected a picture of him, not a dead image icon. I called the funeral home directly, they dug through their internal folder system, and they emailed me the correct image within two business days. They were able to do this because they still maintain local server backups of everything, even after migrating to the new web structure. I'd recommend just calling them if you're missing something visual rather than waiting around.
Snyder Crissman Funeral Home Obituaries Honoring Local Lives With Dignified Digital Archives
The search functionality gives you three filter options: name, date range, and location. The date range is useful but the range picker only goes back in five-year increments, so if you're looking for something from 2003 and you select 2000 to 2005, it will return about forty results instead of filtering cleanly. You have to manually scroll through. I've found that combining the name field with the broadest possible date range and then reading through the results is faster than fiddling with the filters. It takes about forty-five seconds per name search if the spelling is right. Here's something most people miss: the obituary pages are indexed by Google but the PDF version of each obituary, when available, lives on a separate subdomain. If you're trying to archive or print a clean copy, right-click and save the page, but check the "Download" or "Print" link at the bottom first. Some older entries from before 2012 only have a text-only version hosted there, and those render significantly better on paper than scraping the HTML page directly. The PDF link is usually labeled "Printable Obituary" in small gray text near the funeral details section. The limitation nobody talks about is the gap between 2014 and 2016. There's a noticeable chunk of missing records from that period. The funeral home was in the middle of transitioning their publishing workflow and some entries were published on the old domain and never properly redirected. If you're looking for someone from that window, your best bet is to contact them with the person's full name and approximate date of death. They can look it up in their internal CRM, which still has everything. It usually takes a day or two for a response.
Another edge case is the spelling of surnames. Their system matches on exact character sequences, not phonetic approximations. I once searched for "Kreider" and got zero results because the original submission had it entered as "Creider" due to a clerical error at the time. The correct spelling was in their system but not in the searchable index field. Again, a phone call resolved it in ten minutes. They were happy to help, just not something you can automate through the website. If you're doing genealogical research or compiling a family history document, the archive is worth the effort but don't expect it to be exhaustive. The coverage is solid for York County and surrounding areas in Pennsylvania, but records from before 2009 are incomplete because the funeral home didn't digitize their paper files until around 2010. Anything earlier than that requires a physical records request, which they process on a first-come basis and can take three to four weeks depending on staffing. Factor that in if you're working on a timeline.
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