Reading Pellerin Funeral Home Obituaries Is Easier Than You Think
I found myself digging into Pellerin Funeral Home's obituary section last month after a neighbor passed away. Not the first time, probably won't be the last. There's something about local funeral home websites that makes people freeze up. They look different from everything else on the internet. Old HTML. Confusing navigation. Sometimes pages that don't even load right on a phone. But the obituaries themselves are usually straightforward if you know where to look and what to expect. The obituary page at Pellerin isn't exactly modern. It was built at a time when funeral homes still thought their audience was people who called ahead rather than Googled at 2 AM. That means the layout is dense, the search function is basic, and you'll probably need to know the general timeframe or the person's full name before you can find anything useful. I spent about twenty minutes just navigating the archive before I figured out that the listings are organized by date of death, not by when the obituary was published. Here's what I learned doing this a few times over the years, not from any official guide but from actually spending hours on these pages.
How To Find What You're Looking For
The Pellerin obituaries are organized chronologically by death date. The homepage shows the most recent ones first, usually five to ten at a time. If the person you're looking for died more than a couple weeks ago, you're going to need to dig into the archive. Most funeral homes do this through a simple dropdown menu or a link that says something like "Previous Obituaries" or "Archive." Look for it near the top of the obituary listing page, usually on the left or right side depending on how the site was set up. Search by the person's full name. Last name first, obviously. First name second if the site supports two-field searching. I tried searching by nickname once and got nowhere. The funeral home staff enters these by legal name, so casual names almost never work. This came up for me when my aunt died and everyone in the family called her "Bee" but the obituary said "Margaret." There's no advanced search. No filters by year, no location-based filtering, no way to sort by age or cause of death. The site is what it is. If you're looking for someone who died in a specific month two years ago, you're going to click through several pages of obituaries until you hit that window. It takes maybe ten to fifteen minutes if you're methodical about it.
What Information Is Actually Available
Most obituaries at Pellerin contain the same core details. Full name, age at death, date of death, sometimes date of birth. There's usually a short biographical paragraph covering where they lived, who they worked for, what organizations they were part of. Family members are listed, typically survivors and predeceased relatives. Service information comes next, with the date, time, and location of the funeral or memorial. Some include a brief mention of whether donations should go to a particular charity instead of flowers. The photos attached to these pages are another thing people find useful. Almost every obituary has at least one photo of the deceased. Sometimes family photos or pictures related to their hobbies or career. These are usually small thumbnails that open larger when clicked. If you're trying to identify someone from a distant relative or a community connection, the photo can be worth a lot. I once matched an obituary to a person in our family by the picture of his old pickup truck in the driveway. Sometimes there are guestbook entries. These are messages left by people who knew the deceased or their family. They're often where you find the real stories, the personal memories that don't make it into the formal obituary text. Reading through guestbooks can give you a much fuller picture of who someone was than the official notice ever will.
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Common Problems And How To Deal With Them
The website doesn't always update immediately. When someone dies, there's usually a delay before the obituary appears. This can range from a few hours to two or three days depending on how quickly the family provides information and how busy the funeral home is. I've seen cases where the service was already held before the online notice went up. If you're looking for something recent and it's not there yet, check back in a day or two. Older obituaries are harder to find because the site doesn't always index them properly. Entries from several years back may be linked from archive pages, but sometimes those links are broken or point to pages that no longer exist. I ran into this looking for an obituary from 2018. The link on the archive page returned a 404 error. I ended up using the Wayback Machine to find the original page. That worked, but it's not a solution most people think to try. Mobile access is poor. The site was not designed for phones. Text is small, buttons are hard to tap, and some pages don't load correctly on mobile browsers. If you're going to spend time on this site, do it on a computer. It saves a lot of frustration.
Searching Beyond The Website
Google itself is often better than the site's own search. Try a query like "Pellerin Funeral Home obituary [name]" in quotes around the person's name. Google indexes these pages thoroughly and sometimes surfaces results that the site's internal search misses. I found an obituary this way that the archived link on the funeral home website had dropped months earlier. Newspaper archives are another option. Many obituaries from Pellerin also appear in local newspapers, sometimes with additional content that doesn't make it onto the website. The funeral home staff may have submitted a shorter version to the paper or allowed a longer one. Checking the newspaper's online archive can fill in details that are missing from the digital obituary. If you need something really specific and can't find it online, calling the funeral home directly is the most reliable approach. They keep records of all their obituaries, and the staff is usually willing to help someone who is genuinely looking for information. I called once asking about a great-uncle whose obituary I couldn't locate. They found it within ten minutes and read the key details over the phone. It was a slow Monday morning, which probably helped.
What To Do With The Information
Once you find what you're looking for, take a screenshot or print the page. These websites don't always stay up forever. Pages get moved, URLs change, and sometimes entire sites are redesigned without preserving old content. I lost access to two obituaries this way over the past few years. They were gone when I tried to revisit them, and there was no backup anywhere. If you're doing genealogical research, the obituaries are useful but they have limits. They tell you about the person who died, not about their parents or siblings unless those relationships are mentioned in the text. The information is also secondhand in most cases, prepared by family members or the funeral home rather than by independent researchers. Cross-reference with other sources whenever possible. The guestbook entries are often the most valuable part. People write things in guestbooks they wouldn't put in a newspaper or a formal obituary. Hobbies, inside jokes, career milestones, the small details that make a person feel real. I've kept screenshots of guestbook pages from obituaries I care about, and they've been more useful for family history than anything I found in official records.
A Few Things The Site Won't Tell You
Not everyone who dies locally goes through Pellerin. Some families choose other funeral homes, and some handle arrangements privately without a funeral home at all. If you can't find an obituary here, it doesn't necessarily mean the person didn't die or that the family didn't hold services. Check other local funeral homes or the newspaper archives. The age listed on an obituary is sometimes approximate. Funeral homes rely on information provided by families, and not everyone knows their exact birth date. I've seen ages off by a year or two. This matters more for genealogical work than for casual reading, but it's worth keeping in mind. Service times and locations can change. The obituary lists the planned arrangements, but funerals are sometimes moved due to weather, illness of family members, or other logistical issues. If you're planning to attend based on what you read online, confirm with the funeral home or the family before showing up.
Reading these obituaries quietly changes how you see a community. You notice patterns. Some neighborhoods produce more obituaries than others, sometimes because of population density, sometimes because of age distribution. You see how long people live in the same place. You notice which churches and organizations show up repeatedly. It's data, but it feels different when it's people you might have passed on the street.
