Finding the Right Information in Texarkana Gazette Obituaries
The Texarkana Gazette runs obituaries the same way most regional newspapers do, but there are enough local quirks that if you are just looking for a death notice and want actual facts, you will run into a few dead ends pretty quickly. I spent way too many afternoons digging through their archive because my grandmother grew up near Texarkana and my family wanted to track down some distant relatives. What follows is basically what I learned the hard way. The Gazette is a daily paper covering Bowie County in Texas and Miller County in Arkansas. That cross-state thing matters more than you might expect. Some of the people you end up looking for lived on the Arkansas side but had family in Texas, or vice versa. The obituary might mention a church or a cemetery that does not exist in Bowie County records. I learned this the hard way when I spent two weekends looking for a grave marker at a cemetery near Mount Olive, Texas, only to realize the person I was researching actually died while visiting family in Arkansas and the service was held over the border. The main way to access their obituaries is through their website at texarkana-gazette.com. They have a dedicated obituaries section where recent notices are posted daily. Most of them appear within a day or two of the death, though the exact timing depends on when the funeral home submits the copy. If you are trying to find something older than a few weeks, you need to dig into the archive, which is accessible through the website or sometimes through their print archive database depending on your access level.
Here is the thing most people do not figure out right away: the online archive is not a clean, searchable database in the way you might want it to be. The Gazette uses a third-party platform called Death Memory for their obituary hosting. When you search for a name, you are actually searching through the Death Memory system that the paper has integrated. The search interface is functional but not particularly good. It does not handle middle names consistently, and it does not always pick up on nicknames. If someone was known as "Bobby" but the obituary says "Robert," a basic search for Bobby might not surface it unless the submission included that variation somewhere in the text. I ended up writing a small script that pulled the XML sitemap from the Death Memory page and ran a regex filter over all the URLs to grab every obituary link from a given year range. This took me maybe forty minutes to set up, and it saved me hours of clicking through pagination. The sitemap URL pattern is usually something like https://obituaries.deathmemory.com/sitemap.xml for the Gazette. If that changes, you can find the current feed by looking at the obituaries landing page and checking the source code for any sitemap references or atom feeds. For records before the online archive really took off, you are going to want to look at microfilm copies at the local library. The Bowie County Public Library in Texarkana has microfilm of the Gazette going back decades. The Arkansas side has the Miller County Library system. Neither is digital, and neither is particularly user-friendly for searching. You can call ahead and ask if they have a staff member who can run a name search for you, but that is not guaranteed. I found that calling on a Tuesday morning around ten, when the morning rush clears out, tends to work better than any other time.
One edge case that threw me for a loop: the Gazette occasionally publishes what they call "life sketches" rather than full obituaries, especially for less prominent community members. These are shorter, sometimes just a paragraph or two, and they follow the same format but with far less detail. I wasted almost three days looking for a life sketch that was filed under a maiden name I did not have, before realizing I should have checked the person's married name first. The life sketch mentioned the husband's surname in the first line, which I completely missed because I was scanning for the person's own name. Another thing to know about cross-border deaths. The Gazette is a Texas paper, so their standard obituary submissions tend to reflect Texas funeral practices and terminology. If the deceased lived in Arkansas, the funeral home might have submitted through an Arkansas-based system that uses different formatting. I found this particularly confusing with military obituaries. The Gazette runs its own military section, and some of those pieces pull from national databases, which means the dates and details do not always match the local funeral home submission exactly. If you are tracking military service, cross-reference with the National Archives or Fold3 before assuming the Gazette version is the final word. For genealogy purposes, the obituaries in the Gazette are most useful for the names of surviving family members, the funeral home information, and the cemetery location. Those three data points are where the real value sits. The biographical paragraphs are often generic, especially in the shorter notices. The life sketch format in particular tends to skip over educational history, employment details, and early life information that genealogists usually care about. If you need those details, you will need to pivot to census records, military drafts, or city directories pretty quickly.
Get the Full Details
The Gazette does offer a print archive retrieval service where you can request copies of old issues. There is a fee attached, usually around twenty to thirty dollars per request depending on how far back you are going. I found it cheaper and faster to just drive down to the Bowie County library and use their microfilm reader. The reader is an old machine that takes a minute to focus, but it works. You can photograph pages with your phone if you hold it steady. I managed to get legible photos of a three-page obituary chain spanning from 1978 to 2004, which traced a family across two generations. That would have cost me a fortune through the retrieval service. If you are doing serious research, I would also recommend keeping an eye on the Funeral Directory section that runs alongside the obituaries. Sometimes the funeral home listed in the directory entry has more contact information than what appears in the actual obituary. A few times I was able to reach the funeral home directly and get access to records that were never published, including full death certificate copies and burial permits. This is particularly useful when the published obituary is vague about the date of death or the burial location. The main limitation with the Gazette's online system is that the archive search does not support Boolean operators, date range filters, or wildcard matching. You are stuck with simple keyword searches. This means if you are looking for someone who goes by multiple names or who appears in an obituary as part of a family notice rather than their own separate entry, you will miss it on a direct search. My workaround was to search for the surname combined with common location markers like street names, church names, or employer names from the area. A name like "Margaret Thompson" might pull back hundreds of results, but "Thompson Oak Hill Baptist" or "Thompson Texarkana Memorial" tends to narrow things down significantly.
Also worth noting: the Gazette occasionally republishes or links to obituaries that originated from funeral homes in neighboring papers like the Arkansas Times or the Bryan College Station Daily News. If a person died on the Arkansas side but had Texas family who wanted a Texas publication, you might find their notice in the Gazette even if they never lived in Bowie County. The reverse happens too. I tracked down a set of cousins by finding an obituary for their aunt that referenced a sister living in Texarkana, even though the deceased had never set foot in Texas. The connection point was a funeral home address listed in the notice, and that address happened to be in Bowie County. If you need help navigating this, the Gazette's editorial office is reasonably responsive to public records requests. They are not going to do the research for you, but they can confirm whether a particular issue contained an obituary for a name you provide. Call or email and give them the approximate date range and full name. They can usually tell you within a business day whether it is there and which page it appears on. That saves you from spending an afternoon on microfilm guessing at dates. The biggest takeaway is that the Texarkana Gazette obituary system works, but it was not built with genealogical research as a primary use case. It was built to serve families who want to share a notice and get it online quickly. Everything else is secondary. If you approach it with that framing, you will find the information you need without getting frustrated by the gaps. If you treat it like a proper archival database, you will hit walls pretty fast.
