Getting Your Family Names Into the Digital Archive
The El Paso Obituary Project Honoring Lives Lost In The Borderland Through Digital Memorials is a volunteer-driven digital archive that collects and preserves obituary records from the El Paso region and surrounding communities along the U.S.-Mexico border. It isn't a government database or a commercial service. It's run by people who noticed that local funeral home records, newspaper archives, and cemetery documents were slowly disappearing and decided to do something about it. The project digitizes physical obituaries, transcribes Spanish-language death notices, and makes them searchable online so families and researchers can find records that would otherwise be lost to deterioration or neglect. I started contributing records to this project about three years ago after a friend tried to track down her grandmother's death certificate and couldn't find it anywhere. The local newspaper microfilm was water-damaged. The funeral home had closed and relocated twice. What she eventually found was a scanned obituary someone had typed up and posted to this site. That got me involved.
The El Paso Obituary Project Honoring Lives Lost In The Borderland Through Digital Memorials
Here is how the submission and verification process actually works in practice. You begin by visiting the project's website and creating a contributor account. You will need to verify your email address, and then you can start uploading scans of physical obituaries or entering data manually if you only have access to handwritten death notices or cemetery records. The upload form asks for the full name of the deceased, date of death, funeral home that handled arrangements, source document type, and any additional notes about language or legibility issues on the original record. One thing most people don't realize is that the project accepts records in both English and Spanish, which matters because a significant portion of border obituaries are published in Spanish-language newspapers like El Diario de El Paso or posted on Mexican cemetery websites. When you submit a Spanish-language record, you should flag it during the upload process so the transcription team knows to preserve the original language rather than automatically translating it into English. Translation changes names, dates, and relationships in ways that can make genealogical research inaccurate. I ran into a specific problem last year that illustrates why this flagging step matters. I submitted a record for a woman named Maria del Carmen Reyes Gutierrez. The obituary was from a 1998 issue of a Chihuahua newspaper, and the funeral home listed on the document used an outdated name that had changed after a merger in 2003. The automated system initially matched my submission to a different Reyes family record from 2011 because the first and last names were common enough. It took about two weeks before a volunteer reviewer flagged the date discrepancy and corrected the entry. The workaround was straightforward: I included the exact funeral home name and city as they appeared on the original document, plus a note in the remarks field explaining the name change timeline. That note is what allowed the reviewer to distinguish between the two different records. Going forward, I now always include the funeral home's current and former names when they are known.
The verification process is where the project earns its reputation for accuracy. Every submission goes through a manual review by a volunteer who checks the transcribed data against the uploaded scan. This usually takes between three and ten business days. During that time, you may receive a message asking for clarification on a blurry section, a conflicting date, or a missing field. These messages come from actual people who spent time cross-referencing multiple sources. I have had reviewers ask me to clarify whether a middle initial on a death certificate matched the one on the obituary, or whether a birth date listed in a funeral program contradicted the one on the cemetery plot record. These questions are not bureaucratic hurdles. They are genuine fact-checking that prevents errors from entering the archive permanently. There are limitations you should understand before you start using this resource. The project does not cover all of Texas or all of New Mexico. Its coverage is heaviest in El Paso County and adjacent areas in Mexico like Ciudad Juarez and Janos. If your ancestor died in Houston or San Antonio, this database will likely have little or nothing for you. The project also does not include death certificates issued by the state. It focuses on obituaries and death notices, which means you will still need to request official vital records through the Texas Department of State Health Services or the appropriate county clerk for legal purposes. Another practical limitation is that older records from before 1970 are sparser. Many newspapers in the region did not publish obituaries for everyday residents during that period, reserving space for prominent community members. Rural cemetery records from the 1940s and earlier are also underrepresented because those documents were often kept in local churches or family Bibles rather than institutional archives. If you are researching ancestors from that era, you will need to supplement the project's database with county courthouse records, church baptismal files, and Mexican civil registration documents from the estado civil.
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The search interface is functional but basic. It supports name-based queries with filters for date range and source type. There is no advanced genetic genealogy integration, no connection to DNA match databases, and no map view showing where someone was buried relative to their family plots. For many researchers this is sufficient. If you need those features, you would pair your search on this project with Find a Grave, FamilySearch, or Ancestry's record collections to fill the gaps. For people who want to contribute, the main bottleneck is image quality. Volunteers need clear, high-resolution scans of the original obituary or death notice. Phone camera photos that are blurry or have glare on glossy newspaper sections are frequently rejected and sent back for resubmission. A flatbed scanner at 300 DPI minimum produces acceptable results. If you are dealing with yellowed or brittle paper, handle it with clean hands or cotton gloves and avoid flashing the camera directly on ink that may fade under intense light. I also recommend keeping a log of every submission you make. Record the submission ID, the date you submitted, the name of the deceased, and the date you received any reviewer feedback. The project is volunteer-staffed and response times vary. Without a log, you will forget which records you have already submitted and which ones are still pending review. This happened to me twice in my first year, and I ended up accidentally duplicating two entries before realizing I had already sent them in.
Download links for the project are straightforward. You do not need to pay for access to view or search the database. The website provides free browsing and downloading of public domain records. For bulk data access or commercial licensing of the archive, you contact the project administrators directly through the email listed on the site. They handle requests on a case-by-case basis and typically respond within a week. The project has been running for roughly eight years at this point. The archive contains somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 to 60,000 digitized obituary records, though the exact count shifts as new submissions are verified and old duplicates are removed. It is not the largest obituary database in the country, but it fills a niche that larger commercial platforms ignore because the border region's bilingual, binational record-keeping landscape does not fit neatly into standard genealogical indexing systems. That is why the project matters. It preserves records that would otherwise sit in unreadable microfilm or fall apart in climate-damaged storage rooms. If you are researching borderland ancestry, start with this project before you spend money on subscription databases. The records are free, the verification standards are high, and the volunteers who maintain it are responsive to correction requests. Just be prepared to provide detailed source information upfront, flag Spanish-language documents properly, and keep your own submission tracker. Those three habits will save you more time than any feature the website offers.
