The Evening Sun Obituaries Hanover Honoring Lives Preserving Stories Of Community

Working With the Evening Sun's Hanover Obituary Section

The Evening Sun runs obituaries for the Hanover, Pennsylvania area out of their York-based office. If you're trying to submit one or find a specific notice, here is how the process actually works and where people tend to mess it up. These notices appear both in the print edition and on their website. The paper covers parts of York and Lancaster counties, with Hanover sitting in the northern York County coverage zone. Notices run for a set number of days depending on what package you purchase, and the cost scales with length and whether you include a photograph. I spent years coordinating obituary submissions for a funeral home in the area, so I have dealt with every edge case this process throws at you. The biggest issue nobody warns you about is the photograph resolution requirement. The Evening Sun accepts digital photos, but they reject most smartphone images because they come in at the wrong dimensions or color space. I learned this the hard way when a family submitted a portrait straight from an iPhone, and the photo came back blurry and desaturated. The workaround is simple: convert the image to sRGB color profile and resize it to at least 1200 by 1600 pixels before sending it in. Do that before you submit, not after they call you asking for a replacement.

Another thing that catches people off guard is the submission deadline. The print cutoff is typically 2 PM Eastern Time on the business day before the desired publication date. If you miss that window, your notice does not automatically roll over to the next day. You have to resubmit it entirely, and some families lose their spot entirely during holiday weeks when the newsroom is short-staffed. I always tell clients to submit at least one day earlier than they think they need to, just to buffer against unexpected delays. The online portion runs through Legacy.com, which handles most of the intake now. You can submit directly through the Evening Sun's website, but you will be routed to the Legacy platform for the actual form filling. The process asks for the basic information: full name, age, date of death, surviving family members, service details, and a biographical sketch. You also pick how many days you want the notice to run. A standard single-day notice in the print edition starts around $150 to $200 depending on current rates, and each additional day adds a flat fee. Including a photo bumps the price up further, usually by another $50 to $100 for the first insertion. If you are working with a tight budget, you can opt for a minimal notice that runs just one day online, which is significantly cheaper than print. Some families do this to save money, then share the link widely through social media instead. It is not ideal if you want broader community awareness, but it gets the facts out there without the full print cost.

Writing the actual text is where most people struggle. The Evening Sun does not ghostwrite obituaries for you. They will accept a draft you prepare, or you can ask your funeral director to help compose one, but they expect you to provide the core content. A typical notice runs between 200 and 500 words. Going much longer than that increases your cost without necessarily improving readability. Keep it factual, list the survivors in the standard order, mention the service time and location, and include any charity donation preferences at the end.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

The most frequent error is misspelling a surviving family member's name or getting the relationship wrong. Once a notice prints, correcting it requires filing an amendment request and paying a fee, which can be anywhere from $25 to $75 depending on how far along the production cycle you are. I always recommend having at least two people proofread the submission before you send it in, and triple-checking every name against official documents if you are unsure. Another issue is conflicting information about the date of death. If the obituary says one date and the death certificate shows another, the corrections process becomes more cumbersome. Make sure the date you provide matches the certified record exactly. This matters especially if the notice includes funeral home or cemetery information that needs to line up with public records. The system also has limitations when it comes to certain types of notices. The Evening Sun does not publish paid memorials for pets, and they generally do not carry funeral home advertisements that are purely promotional in nature. Their obituary section is meant for genuine death notices and memorial content. If you are trying to use the space for something else, you will likely get rejected or redirected to their classified advertising department, which operates under a completely different pricing structure.

Where to Submit

You can submit directly through the Evening Sun's official website at eveningtimesun.com, which will guide you to the Legacy.com obituary portal. Alternatively, many local funeral homes in the Hanover area have established accounts and can submit on behalf of families. This is often the smoother route because the funeral directors know exactly how to format the notice and handle the technical side of photo uploads and deadline management. If you are searching for an existing obituary rather than submitting one, the Legacy.com site hosts the archived notices, and the Evening Sun's website may have a limited searchable archive as well. Older notices sometimes disappear from the digital archive after a few years, so if you need something historical, checking with the Hanover-Taneystown Library or the York County genealogy society may yield better results than relying on the online system alone.