How to Find and Work With Southcoasttoday New Bedford Obituaries
You probably know the drill. Someone you know has passed away, or you need to verify a date for a family member, or you're doing genealogy work and need a record. The South Coast of Massachusetts doesn't have the same kind of centralized funeral home database you'd find in bigger cities, so most local obituaries end up on the Southcoasttoday.com obituaries page. I've spent years pulling records from this source, and here's what actually works when you're trying to find something specific. The site itself is straightforward, but the search function is not great. It does basic keyword matching, which means if you're looking for someone with an uncommon first name and a very common last name — like "Robert Thompson" — you're going to get a lot of noise. I learned this the hard way about three years ago when I was tracking down my grandmother's second cousin's death notice. The search returned 47 results for "Thompson" alone in the New Bedford area, and half of them were from 2019 or earlier because the site's filtering by date is basically a dropdown with year-level granularity. You can't filter by month within a year unless you manually scan. Here's the workaround I use now: go to the obituaries section, then use your browser's built-in find function (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) to search the entire page for the surname. This gets you past the site's search limitation entirely. It's slower than a proper filter, but it's reliable. Once you've narrowed down to the right name, click through to the full obituary page. These pages tend to include the person's full name, age, date of death, surviving family members, and sometimes the funeral home handling arrangements. The key detail most people miss is the date range in the URL. If someone died in late December but the obituary was published in early January, the article URL often contains the publication date, not the death date. I've wasted time cross-referencing civil records against the wrong date because of this.
The site publishes two types of content that look similar but serve different purposes. One is the full obituary, usually written by family members and submitted through a funeral home partner. The other is the brief death notice, which is more of a factual announcement. The death notices are useful when you need a quick confirmation — name, age, date of death — without wading through a long tribute. The full obituaries are better for genealogy because they list survivors, which gives you living family connections to follow up on. I keep a spreadsheet for this. Not a fancy one, just a Google Sheet with columns for full name, date of death, funeral home, surviving spouse, and children's names. It takes maybe five minutes per entry to populate, and it saves you from having to re-read the same obituary three times because you can't remember who the mother-in-law's name was. There are a few things the site doesn't do well, and you should be aware of them before you invest too much time. First, older obituaries get buried. There's no true archive search. If you're looking for something from 2015 or earlier, you're mostly out of luck unless it was republished or linked elsewhere. Second, the site doesn't consistently index obituaries on Google the way larger publications do. A search for "[name] New Bedford obituary" will often pull results from legacy.com or newspaper archive sites before it pulls the actual Southcoasttoday article. This isn't a bug, it's just how the site's SEO works. If you need a record that's definitely from Southcoasttoday and it's not appearing in search results, go direct to the site rather than relying on Google. Another edge case that caught me off guard: the obituary submission process goes through funeral homes, not directly through the newspaper. That means if a family used a smaller funeral home outside the immediate New Bedford area — say, in Fall River or Fairhaven — the obituary might be published under a slightly different regional header on the site. It'll still be on Southcoasttoday.com, but it may not show up if you're only scanning the New Bedford-specific section. I ran into this when researching a relative who died in a hospital in Taunton but had funeral arrangements in Plymouth. The obituary was still in the South Coast section, but I missed it initially because I was looking at the wrong subsection. The fix was to broaden the search to include all South Coast communities, not just New Bedford.
If you're doing serious research — genealogy, legal matters, property disputes — you shouldn't rely on Southcoasttoday as your only source. It's a good supplementary record, but it's not comprehensive. Many families choose not to publish obituaries, or they publish only in regional papers that don't syndicate to the website. The Bristol County Registry of Deeds and the Massachusetts Death Index are better primary sources for verification. I always cross-check with the state death index when I can. The information matches up about 90 percent of the time, and the few discrepancies — a misspelled middle name, an incorrect birth year — are worth noting because they tell you where the family may have made an error when filing the original death certificate or submitting the obituary text. The one practical tip I'll leave you with: bookmark the obituaries page and check it weekly if you're actively researching someone. New entries go up every day, and if you're waiting for a specific person's notice to appear, checking manually once a week is faster than setting up alerts that may or may not fire correctly. The site doesn't offer email notifications for new obituaries, so automation isn't really an option here.
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