Finding Your Way Through SI Advance Obituaries
I spent last winter helping my aunt compile some family records for a distant relative who passed away in New Brighton. The obituary was listed on the Staten Island Advance site, but finding it took longer than it should have. I learned a few things in the process that might save you some time. The Staten Island Advance publishes obituaries through their main website and a partnership with Legacy.com. When you're searching for someone, the most straightforward path is going to the SI Advance homepage and using their obituary search tool. You can filter by name, date range, and neighborhood. The database goes back several decades, though coverage before 2010 is spotty for older records. Here's what actually works when you're trying to locate a specific obituary: use the person's full name plus "Staten Island" in the search bar if the built-in tool isn't giving you results. I found my uncle's former coworker's obituary that way after the formal search returned nothing. The person had moved to Pennsylvania recently, and the obituary was listed under their current city rather than their Staten Island address. The Advanced Search has a "Place of Death" or "Residence" field that can help narrow things down, but it's not always reliable because funeral homes submit these under whatever address they have on file.
One thing the website doesn't make obvious is that you can access the full archive without creating an account. Some people pay for Legacy.com subscriptions thinking they need one to read older obituaries. You don't. The Advance keeps the core obituary content free. What changes is whether you can see photos attached to the listing. Photo galleries from 2018 onward sometimes require a digital subscription, which costs around $4.99 a month if you go that route. For just reading the text and viewing funeral home details, you're fine without paying anything. If you're looking for a death notice from before digital publication started around 2008, your best bet is contacting the Advance directly or visiting the Richmond County Historical Society. They have microfilm records that aren't available online. I tried looking up a great uncle who died in 2003 and ended up driving to the library downtown because the website only had the notice from the funeral home press release, not the full text that ran in print. The library version included the survivor list and service details that were never digitized. Another thing worth noting: funeral homes submit obituaries through a portal, and not all of them are thorough. I've seen entries with just a name and service time, missing the bio paragraph entirely. This usually happens when the family submits a minimal version to save on publication fees, since the Advance charges by the line or by the inch depending on how you format it. A standard obituary with photo runs anywhere from $150 to $400 depending on length. That's why some listings look thin while others are several paragraphs long. There's no way to know which one you're looking at just from the search result.
When you do find the right obituary, the page will typically include the funeral home contact information, service details, and sometimes a link to a guestbook where people leave messages. Those guestbooks are useful if you're researching a family tree because they often list relationships between the deceased and survivors that aren't mentioned in the obituary text itself. I found my aunt's maiden name listed in a guestbook comment from a cousin I didn't know existed, and that connection ended up helping verify a branch of the family tree we'd been unsure about. The search tool does have a glitch where it sometimes returns results for people with similar names in other boroughs or nearby towns. If you're searching for a common last name, tighten your date range and double-check the residence information on each result. The Advance covers a broader area than just Staten Island, so a result for someone in nearby Elizabeth, New Jersey could show up in your search if they have a connection to the island. For anyone doing genealogy work, I'd recommend bookmarking the obituary section and checking it periodically if you're searching for someone who died years ago. New obituaries get added daily, but the site also retroactively publishes scanned versions of older print notices. These appear without fanfare and can show up weeks or months after the original publication date. I stumbled on a 1997 obituary that had been uploaded to the site the week before I needed it, and it filled in details I couldn't find anywhere else.
Get the Full Details
If you need official confirmation of a death for legal or financial reasons, the obituary won't work. You'll need a death certificate from the New York City Department of Health. The Advance obituaries are helpful for context and personal details, but they're not a substitute for the actual record. I learned that the hard way when I was trying to close out a bank account and the institution rejected the obituary printout.
