Understanding Sunday Obituaries at the Star Tribune
The Star Tribune publishes obituaries in print every Sunday, and they have been doing it for decades. It is not a single continuous column anymore. You will find them scattered across multiple pages, usually starting on the front page of the Metro section and running through the back pages. Some are family-written. Others are produced by funeral homes who send in copy and photos. The layout has changed over the years, but the function remains the same: people go there to remember someone. I have spent more time than I would like to admit digging through these archives. Not for research, but because I was looking for my grandmother's obituary after my mother died, and the family tree got tangled in a way that made me realize I did not know nearly enough about her early life. What I found in those Sunday pages ended up being more useful than any genealogy website.
Star Tribune Obituaries Sunday A Look At The History Significance And Modern Takes
The history here goes back to the early 1900s when the paper was a morning daily and the Sunday edition carried the longest form pieces of the week. Obituaries were treated differently back then. They were more like short biographies. A person could get three or four paragraphs even if they had never done anything extraordinary by modern standards, because the paper believed in recording the community one death at a time. By the 1970s and 1980s, the style shifted. Obituaries became shorter, more formulaic. Funeral homes started submitting templates. The newspaper began running length-based pricing for the print version, which meant a two-paragraph notice cost less than a full-page spread. This is still how it works today. If you want to place an obituary in the Sunday Star Tribune, you can expect to pay anywhere from around two hundred dollars for a basic notice to over a thousand dollars if you want a full layout with multiple photos. One thing most people do not understand about the Sunday obituary section is that it is not purely an archive. The paper does not keep a public searchable database of every obituary from every Sunday going back to the 1950s. The online archives go back to roughly 2002, and even then the coverage is spotty for the earliest years. Before that, you are dealing with physical microfilm or bound volumes that most libraries only keep in their reference sections.
I ran into this exact problem when I was trying to track down a great-uncle who died in 1988. His family had moved out of state and lost the clipping. The Minneapolis Public Library had the microfilm, but the machine only allowed you to view one week at a time, and you could not export images. I ended up taking handwritten notes from three separate weeks of the film reader, then cross-referencing with the Social Security Death Index to confirm the date. It took about forty-five minutes. A lot of people would have given up after the first ten. The modern version of the Sunday obituary section is now available on the Star Tribune website. They publish new obituaries online every day, but the Sunday print edition still carries the longer pieces. Some families choose to publish only in print because they prefer the permanence of it. Others put it online and share the link on social media. The funeral home that handles the arrangements usually asks about this preference, so you are not starting from scratch if you are organizing a service right now. Here is a practical step-by-step approach if you need to locate or publish something:
Get the Full Details
If you are trying to find a past obituary from the Sunday edition and it is after 2002, go to the Star Tribune website and use their obituary search. You can filter by date, name, and location. It is not perfect. Sometimes names come back misspelled because of OCR errors on the older digitized pages. If you search for "Robert Johnson" and get thousands of results, narrow it by funeral home or by the city where the person lived. That usually cuts the list down significantly. For anything before 2002, your options are limited. The Hennepin County Library has microfilm copies of the Star Tribune going back to the 1950s, and their staff can help you pull the right week. There is a small fee for reproduction. The Minnesota Historical Society also holds physical copies in their stacks, and you can request them through their reading room. You cannot browse freely. You have to know approximately what date you are looking for, or at least the year. If you are placing an obituary for someone who recently died, the fastest route is to contact a Minneapolis-area funeral home. They already have accounts set up with the Star Tribune and know the deadlines. The Sunday obituary deadline is typically Wednesday at noon for inclusion in the weekend edition. If you miss that window, it goes into the following Sunday's paper. Weekday online obituaries can be submitted anytime, but they will not appear in the Sunday print package unless you specifically request it and pay the additional placement fee.
A detail that trips people up is the photo policy. The Star Tribune accepts digital photos for Sunday obituaries, but they require high-resolution files. A phone picture taken at arm's length will not meet the standard. The funeral home will usually handle the upload if you give them the file directly. Keep in mind that copyrighted images, including sports team photos or military portraits that belong to an agency, may be rejected. Stick to personal family photos or standard headshots. There is a broader significance to the Sunday obituary section that goes beyond the practical details. In a city like Minneapolis, these pages function as a kind of informal census. You can see which neighborhoods were hit hardest by certain causes of death in a given year. You can trace migration patterns by watching where people say they grew up versus where they died. During the opioid crisis in the mid-2010s, the age range in those Sunday pages dropped noticeably, and it stayed low for several years. That is data that does not show up in any government report. The section also preserves dialect and regional speech patterns. Reading obituaries from the 1960s gives you a sense of how people talked about each other. "Departed this life" was common. "Passed away" became standard later. The phrasing tells you something about the era even when the facts are plain.
One common pitfall I keep seeing is people assuming that because an obituary exists online, it is complete. It is not. The printed Sunday version often contains details that were omitted from the online posting, sometimes because the online version was shortened to save space or due to a last-minute edit by the family. If you are doing serious research, always check the Sunday print edition if you have access to it. The digital version is a supplement, not a replacement. Another issue is the lag time between death and publication. The Star Tribune publishes obituaries from all over the Twin Cities metro area and parts of surrounding Minnesota and Wisconsin. If the person died in a rural hospital outside the metro, the paperwork might not reach the paper on time for the Sunday edition. I have seen cases where a death in January was not reflected in the Sunday pages until the following February, sometimes because the family did not submit the obituary promptly, sometimes because the funeral home had a backlog during the holiday season. If you are looking for someone who died in a small town and the Star Tribune does not have their obituary, check the local paper where they lived. Many smaller Minnesota newspapers do not have searchable archives at all, and you may need to contact them directly by phone. It is a slower process, but it is often the only way.
The Star Tribune does offer an annual obituary compilation book. It is published in late December or early January and includes every obituary that appeared in the Sunday print section during the prior calendar year. It is a thick paperback, usually around four hundred to five hundred pages. You can order it from the newspaper or find it at some local bookstores. It is useful if you want a physical record of a particular year without digging through individual copies of the Sunday paper. For most people dealing with this material, the goal is either to find a specific obituary or to publish one. Both are straightforward if you know the deadlines and the limitations. The Sunday section is one of the few remaining places in mainstream media where ordinary lives get recorded with some degree of detail, and it is worth understanding how to navigate it properly.
