Working With Strang Funeral Home On Obituaries
Strang Funeral Home has been operating out of Grayslake for a while now, and they handle a lot of the obituary writing for people in the surrounding Lake County area. If you're dealing with arranging something there, here's how the process actually works, what trips people up, and what I've learned from helping families through it. Getting an obituary published through them usually starts with a phone call to their main office. They'll ask you to come in or fill out a preliminary information sheet with the basics — full name, date of birth, date of passing, surviving family members, and a rough idea of what the person's life looked like. The actual writing is done by their staff, not you. You provide the raw material and they draft something that fits the format of whichever newspaper or website you're using. I've noticed most families underestimate how much detail they need to have ready. The form they give you asks for things like military service dates, specific organization memberships, and even the names of pets sometimes. Without those details, the draft comes back generic and you end up spending more time on revisions. Bring a written list. Just a few sentences per item is fine. Having it down ahead of time saves you from the awkward phone call where you're trying to remember whether your uncle was in the VFW or the American Legion.
The Practical Steps
Here's the straightforward path. First, call Strang at their Grayslake location and let them know you need obituary assistance. They'll schedule a time for you to either visit or talk by phone. Second, gather the biographical details I mentioned — dates, organizations, survivors, predeceased relatives. Third, decide where it will be published. They typically place obituaries in the Lake County Tribune, Chicago Tribune, and sometimes smaller community papers depending on where the family lives. Each outlet has different word limits and pricing, so they'll guide you on that but you should be aware the cost adds up quickly if you're running multiple publications. The draft typically comes back within 24 to 48 hours. You get one or two rounds of edits before it's final. This is where the real work happens — making sure the tone matches what the family wants. Some people want something formal and traditional. Others prefer casual and personal. It's worth being explicit about that preference early on instead of getting a draft back and then spending an hour explaining what's wrong with it.
Common Mistakes I've Seen
The biggest issue is sending the obituary to too many newspapers without checking each one's requirements. The Tribune and the Tribune Community Section have different submission deadlines and formatting rules. If you submit to both on the same day, one of them will likely reject it for a minor formatting issue and you'll be scrambling the morning of publication. I had a family last year who did this — they sent the same text to three papers and two of them came back with revision requests the night before the funeral. It was stressful for everyone involved. The workaround is simple: call each publication's obituary desk directly and confirm their current guidelines before submitting anything. Another frequent problem is forgetting to include the service details. The obituary isn't just a biography. It needs to tell people when and where the visitation and funeral are happening, or where the memorial will be if there isn't a traditional service. Skip that and you'll get calls from people asking where to go. Make sure the staff at Strang includes the full service information in the final draft.
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What It Actually Feels Like
Dealing with obituaries while grieving is genuinely unpleasant. You're trying to focus on supporting your family and managing logistics, and then someone is asking you to summarize a lifetime in 300 words. The staff at Strang is used to this. They've seen it enough times that they don't push you to make quick decisions and they don't treat it like a sales opportunity. That's worth noting because not every funeral home operates that way. Some will try to upsell you on larger print runs or additional memorial features that you probably don't need. If you feel rushed at any point, you have the right to ask for more time. They won't cancel your arrangements because you needed an extra day to get the family details right. The obituary can almost always be adjusted after the initial draft, even if it means a small fee for additional revisions beyond what's included in their standard package.
Cost Considerations
Their obituary service is bundled into their overall arrangement costs, but the actual newspaper placement fees are separate and go directly to the publishing companies. Expect to pay somewhere between $150 and $400 total depending on which papers you choose and how long the obituary is. Longer obituaries cost more at every publication. If budget is a concern, focus on one or two major papers rather than spreading it across five smaller ones. A single well-placed obituary in the Tribune reaches more people than five small-town papers with limited circulations. There are situations where working through a funeral home for obituaries isn't ideal. If you need something published quickly — like within 24 hours — the standard turnaround at Strang may not meet that timeline. Their drafting process involves coordination with multiple staff members, and during busy periods that can stretch to three business days. For urgent publications, some families bypass the funeral home entirely and submit directly to the newspaper's online obituary portal, which often has same-day or next-day processing. You lose the professional writing assistance, but you gain speed. Also, if you want a highly personalized or unconventional obituary — something that doesn't follow the traditional structure of surviving family, military service, and church affiliation — the funeral home may not be the best route. Their process is built around standard formats. A freelance writer or someone doing it yourself gives you more flexibility to break from convention. It's not that the conventional approach is bad. It's just that it won't give you something unusual.
