How I Started Transcribing and Publishing Lax Funeral Home Kankakee Obituaries as Audio Content
I didn't set out to build a podcast. It started because I was helping my wife's friend compile family history after her grandfather passed, and the obituary at Lax Funeral Home in Kankakee kept getting lost between printed copies and a poorly maintained webpage. I read it aloud to her once on the phone because she couldn't bring herself to look at the page. She said it felt different hearing it. That was the wrong starting point, technically speaking, but it turned out to be the right one. The core mechanism is straightforward: take the obituary text from Lax Funeral Home's published listings, transcribe or narrate it, and produce it as an audio episode. The website posts new obituaries several times a week. Most of them run between 200 and 600 words. Reading a 400-word obituary takes about three minutes at a measured pace. That's your basic episode length. You don't need music. You don't need a soundstage. You need a USB microphone that doesn't sound like a toaster and a quiet room after 9 PM when the house is still. Here's the part nobody tells you about the workflow. The actual bottleneck isn't recording. It's verification. I assumed early on that the obituary text on the site was the final version. It isn't always. Funeral homes update obituaries when families submit corrections, additional survivors, or service time changes. I recorded and published an episode based on an obituary that got revised forty-eight hours later. The updated version listed a different service location. I had to pull the episode and re-record. Lesson learned: wait at least seventy-two hours after the initial posting before committing to audio. Take a screenshot of the text you're working from. Timestamp it. If the funeral home updates it later, you have a reference point and you know exactly what changed.
Another thing that catches people off guard is audio consistency. Obituaries vary wildly in structure. Some are chronological biographies. Some are lists of survivors with a brief life summary. Some read like military service records. Your vocal delivery needs to adapt to the source material without making it sound like you're performing. I developed a habit of reading the text twice before hitting record. The first read is for comprehension. The second read is for pacing. By the third attempt, my voice settles into something natural. Skipping the first two reads usually means I end up redoing the whole thing because I sound either too brisk or too slow on the opening lines. For production, I use Audacity on a Windows machine. It's free and it does everything I need. Record at 44.1 kHz, mono or stereo doesn't matter much for spoken word, apply a light high-pass filter at 80 Hz to remove room rumble, compress with a ratio around 3:1, and normalize to -16 LUFS for podcast loudness standards. That's it. No equalization curves that matter. No noise gates that create artifacts. The goal is clarity, not polish. Listeners are processing grief-adjacent content. They don't want to hear your room treatment. They want to hear the words. I host on Spotify for Podcasters because it pushes to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and a web player automatically. Upload takes about four minutes from export to live. The RSS feed generates itself. I schedule episodes to publish on Tuesdays and Fridays, which aligns with when Lax typically posts new obituaries. The timing isn't coincidental. It keeps the audio content close to the written source without being derivative.
There are real limitations to this approach. The most obvious one is scope. Lax Funeral Home is one facility in Kankakee, Illinois. The obituaries represent a specific community at a specific time. You're not building a comprehensive archival project. You're documenting a slice of local grief. If you plan to expand to other funeral homes, the workflow scales, but so does the editorial burden. Each home has different update patterns, different web structures, and sometimes different standards for what gets published. I tried adding a second funeral home in the area and cut back after three months because the inconsistency in their posting schedule made the seventy-two-hour verification rule impractical. Stick to one source until you've run it cleanly for six months. A less obvious limitation is emotional fatigue. I don't say that dramatically. It's practical. Reading about deaths every week for an extended period affects you. I noticed it first when I stopped feeling surprised by certain details. A veteran obituary that should have stood out no longer triggered the same response. That's burnout, not desensitization in the clinical sense. It's workload accumulation. I started rotating which obituaries I recorded. I'd skip a particularly dense or brutal one and replace it with a lighter biographical sketch. The audience doesn't know which ones I skipped. I do. It keeps the work sustainable. If your goal is purely archival and you don't need the podcast distribution angle, consider a simple text-based archive instead. A static HTML page with indexed obituaries by date and surname requires zero audio production and survives platform algorithm changes. Podcast directories shut down or change policies regularly. A plain website does not. I keep both running now. The audio content reaches people who want to listen while commuting or doing chores. The text archive serves researchers and genealogists who need to search names quickly. Using both covers more use cases than either alone.
Get the Full Details
The download and listening links point to standard podcast platforms. Search for the show name on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any aggregator. There's no direct file download because podcast RSS feeds handle distribution. If you want offline access, subscribe through your preferred app and download episodes through the app's built-in feature. That's the only legitimate way to get the audio files without scraping. One technical detail that matters more than people expect: file naming. I used to let the upload tool name my episodes. It produced strings like episode_47_final_v2.mp3. Then I switched to a consistent pattern: LaxObit_[Surname]_[DateYYYYMMDD].mp3. It sounds trivial but it makes finding a specific episode during post-production debugging significantly faster. When a listener emails saying the Smith obituary from March has a wrong date, you can locate the source file in under ten seconds instead of digging through a folder of generic names. I also stopped including full service details in the audio version unless they were directly in the obituary text. People called asking about visitation times that weren't in the script. The obituaries sometimes omit those details or place them in a separate online section. I add a standard disclaimer at the end of each episode directing listeners to the funeral home's website for complete service information. It reduces the incoming call volume and keeps the episodes focused on what the source material actually contains.
The whole process, from identifying a new obituary to publishing the audio episode, takes me roughly forty-five minutes on a typical week. Slower weeks with longer or more complex texts push it to about an hour and ten minutes. Faster weeks where the obituaries are short and clean take twenty minutes. The variability comes from the source material, not the production. Good obituaries are well-written and easy to read. Poor ones require pauses, reruns, and occasionally cutting entire sections because the grammar falls apart mid-sentence. I've edited around sentences that were clearly rushed by someone typing under time pressure. You learn to flatten those out without changing the meaning. If you want to start something similar, begin with a single funeral home, commit to the seventy-two-hour verification window, and accept that the first month will be slower than you expect while you build a repeatable routine. The content itself is stable. The process is what takes time to stabilize.
