Working With Obituaries in St. Augustine
I spend a lot of time reading local obituaries. St. Augustine has a particular rhythm to them that you catch after a while. The city draws two kinds of people: winter visitors who leave in March, and folks who have been there since the 1970s or earlier. Their obituaries reflect that split pretty clearly. When you are looking at obituaries from the St. Augustine Daily Joint Center or the Flagler County ones, you are seeing something that tracks community history more directly than most places. This town has been continuously inhabited for over 400 years. That shows up in how people remember their dead here. The practical side of this is simpler than it sounds. Most families use either the St. Augustine Legacy website or submit directly through the Florida Times-Union obituary system. There is also the local Pardo Builders Funeral Home line, which handles a lot of the older families in the historic district. I have found that submitting through the Times-Union system tends to get wider distribution across both St. Johns and Flagler counties. If you only run it locally, you miss half the people who knew the deceased.
Here is something most people miss: the historic district itself has its own unofficial obituary network. There are neighborhood listservs and the local historical society page that will pick up a death notice and repost it with additional context. A person who dies in a nursing home on Anastasia Boulevard might have their obituary noticed by someone who attended the same Spanish-style church back in the 1980s. That connection does not show up in any official system. You find those details by cross-referencing the funeral home list with the historic preservation newsletters. I ran into a specific problem last year. A woman passed away who had lived in St. Augustine since 1962, but her family had moved to Georgia and only submitted an obituary to a paper in Atlanta. She had taught at the high school, been involved with the botanical gardens, and served on a historic preservation board. Nobody local knew she had died for three weeks. I tracked her down through the school district retirement records and the preservation society meeting minutes. What I did was reach out to the local historical society directly and ask them to post a notice. They ran it on their quarterly update. That got the word out to everyone who actually knew her in this town. If you are researching family history through these obituaries, start with the funeral home records. The obituaries themselves are usually short and standardized. The funeral home files have the longer versions, the guest book entries, and sometimes photos that never made it into the printed version. I keep a folder of scan requests I submit to the different funeral homes. It takes about two weeks to get them back. Worth it for anything before 2005, when digital archiving started becoming standard practice.
There is a cutoff point to be aware of. Obituaries going back to the early 1990s are mostly on microfilm at the St. Augustine Historical Society. The microfilm is organized by publication date, not alphabetically. If you are looking for someone named Maria Gonzalez and you do not know the approximate year, you will spend a very long time winding through reels. The society has a volunteer index that helps, but it is incomplete. I learned to always search by decade first, then narrow it down. That saves several hours per research session. Another thing that trips people up: the date formatting changes depending on where you look. The Times-Union uses the standard American format. The older Spanish colonial records and the Catholic church documents use day-month-year. I once spent two weeks trying to track down an obituary because I was looking at the wrong month entirely. The record was from October. I had been searching in April because the date in my source document was written as 10/4, which in some of these older records means the 10th day of April, not April 10th. Now I check the source document format before I start any search. The digital versions go back to about 1998. Before that, it is all physical archives. The Historical Society's reference room is open Tuesday through Friday, 10 to 4. Weekends they are closed unless you arrange something in advance. I usually go on a Wednesday morning to avoid the tourist rush. There is a small fee for photocopies, but scanning your own documents is allowed. Bring your own adapter cables if you have a newer laptop. The scanners there are from around 2012 and do not have modern ports.
Get the Full Details
If you need something very specific and official, the Florida Department of Health in St. Johns County keeps death certificates. You can request those online now, which is a recent change. It used to require a mail-in form with a notarized copy of your ID. The online system goes back to 1972. Records before that have to be requested through the county clerk's office in person or by mail. Processing time is about ten business days for the online version and up to three weeks for the mail route. What I find most useful about these obituaries is the detail about surviving relatives. In St. Augustine, extended family connections run deep. You can trace a family through three or four generations just by reading who is listed as a survivor. The sibling relationships are especially reliable markers because the tradition of listing all children is stronger here than in many other Florida cities. That is partly because so many families have been here since before statehood. One more thing. The seasonal population shift affects obituary volume significantly. Deaths spike in late February and early March when snowbirds return home. Then there is a lull through September. If you are doing research during the off-season, expect fewer new notices but also less competition for archive resources. The microfilm readers are usually empty in November. March is brutal. I schedule my archive visits for late January or October whenever possible.
