Where to Find and How to Use Obituaries in Stevens Point, WI
If you are looking for obituaries from Stevens Point, Wisconsin, your first stop should be the Post-Crescent's obituary section or the Stevens Point Journal's archive. These two papers have covered the area for decades. The Journal, in particular, maintains a searchable online database that goes back to roughly 2018. Anything before that exists in print or on microfilm at the Portage County Historical Research Center on West MacLean Avenue. I spent a few years helping people trace family lines through these records, and the frustrating part is that not everything has been digitized. I had a client looking for a great-uncle who died in 1994. His obituary was referenced in a 1995 funeral home booklet but the actual text was nowhere on the current website. The workaround was simple once I knew where to look: the Portage County Clerk's office holds death certificate index cards from the 1970s onward, and cross-referencing the death certificate number with the funeral home's own ledgers (some are available at the historical society) filled in the gap. It took about forty-five minutes of phone calls instead of the two hours of fruitless web searches she had already done.
Stevens Point Wi Obituaries Honoring Lives Preserving Community History
The value of these records goes beyond filling in a family tree. They are primary sources for local history, and they are often the only place where certain details survive. A census record tells you someone lived at a certain address on a certain date. An obituary tells you where they worked, who they married, what church they attended, what organization they belonged to, and which survivors remain. That kind of granularity is hard to replace. One thing beginners get wrong is assuming the digital version is the full text. Funeral homes frequently publish an edited version online that trims biographical detail. The printed version in the journal or the copy filed with the Post-Crescent often contains more. If you need complete information, request the archives directly. The newspaper's archive department will send you a scan for a fee, usually around five dollars per page, and it typically arrives within two business days. Another counter-intuitive detail: obituaries from the 1980s and earlier are sometimes filed under the surviving spouse's name rather than the deceased person's if the couple shared a surname. I found this out the hard way when I was researching a family and could not locate a record that was definitely published. A twenty-minute call to the historical society reference desk pointed me to the correct filing, and there it was. Always ask the archivist how they sort pre-1990 entries before you start searching by yourself.
For the most recent deaths, the Doorway Funeral Home and the Raritan Funeral Service both post obituaries on their websites, and those pages are updated within hours. That speed is useful if you need to confirm a service time or donation request. But the archival value is thin because those pages do not stay up forever. If you are doing serious research, save a copy or print to PDF the moment you find what you need. Websites change, pages get moved, and links rot. If you want raw data rather than narrative sketches, the Portage County Register of Deeds and the Wisconsin Division of Health Services' death index are available through a formal records request. The health department charges about three dollars per copy and processes requests in about ten working days. It is slower than the newspaper route but it gives you the exact date of death, cause of death, and birth information that obituaries sometimes summarize loosely. The main limitation of relying on online obituaries is that they reflect what families choose to include, not everything that happened. Economic hardship, family estrangement, and simple oversight mean some deaths go unreported or are reported with minimal detail. For the years around 1930 and during the later 1970s, I noticed significant gaps in the Stevens Point coverage, likely tied to paper shortages and reduced newspaper staff respectively. If your ancestor falls in those windows, supplement the obituary search with World War draft cards, Social Security death index files, and cemetery records from Lakeview and Riverside cemeteries, both of which have searchable interment databases maintained by the city.
Get the Full Details
A practical workflow that saves time: start with the current digital obituary index for recent deaths, move to the journal archive for anything between 1995 and 2010, and then hit the historical society and county clerk for anything older. Budget roughly one to two hours for a complete search on a single person, assuming the death occurred after 1970. Pre-1970 searches can run three to four hours depending on how much material needs to be pulled from microfilm. The links you will actually use are the Stevens Point Journal archives through your public library card, the Portage County Historical Society's research portal, and the Wisconsin Department of Health Services' vital records request page. Most of these require no special equipment, just a patient approach and a willingness to make a few phone calls when the digital trail runs cold.
