How to Research and Archive Valley Independent Obituaries
The Valley Independent is a local newspaper that has published obituaries for decades, and those records are still accessible if you know where to look. They run both in print and on their website, but the online versions aren't always perfectly preserved. I've spent a lot of time pulling old obits for family research, and here's what actually works. What makes these particular obituaries worth tracking down isn't just that they exist, but the kind of detail Valley Independent tends to include. Unlike the generic death notices you see in larger metropolitan papers, their obits usually have funeral home information, surviving family lists, sometimes even a brief career summary or church affiliation. That stuff matters when you're filling in gaps in a family tree. I was researching my grandmother's side last year and found an 1987 obituary that listed her maiden sister's married name and the exact street she lived on. That single line solved a three-year brick wall in my research. The thing nobody tells you about old obituaries is that the PDF scans are often useless for anything other than reading. The Valley Independent's digital archive goes back to around 2008 with reasonable quality, but before that it's mostly low-resolution images of the print page. OCR barely works on them. If you need the text for genealogy databases or citation purposes, your best bet is to read the scan carefully and transcribe it yourself. Yes, that sounds slow, but it takes about five minutes per obit and you catch details that automatic transcription misses entirely. Names get mangled. Dates get shifted. I once had a family member submit a transcribed date from an automated tool and it was off by twelve years because the printer's ink bleed made a 3 look like a 5.
Where to find them: The Valley Independent's website hosts their current obituaries and has a search function at valleyindependent.com. Older issues can be accessed through their archive section, though the search gets rough past the mid-2000s. The library in downtown Valley also keeps microfilm and bound volumes going back to the paper's founding in the early 1970s. If you can't make it in person, the library will do a reference look-up for a small fee, usually around ten dollars per hour of staff time. Call ahead and ask for the local history desk.
Common Problems and How to Handle Them
The biggest issue I run into is incomplete listings. Sometimes the Valley Independent would publish the death notice in one section and the full obituary in another, sometimes on different pages. If someone's obit ran on a Tuesday but the notice was in Thursday's edition, and you only search by the date of death, you'll miss it entirely. Always search a two-week window around the date you think the person died. I learned this the hard way when researching a great-uncle who died on a Friday but whose obit didn't appear until the following Wednesday edition. Spent three weeks thinking he'd been forgotten until I doubled the search range. Another thing to watch for is name variation. The Valley Independent sometimes used nicknames in the headline and full names in the body, or vice versa. Martha could show up as "Mattie" in the title. A common practice back when the paper was smaller was to list people by their relationship rather than their legal name, so you might see "beloved mother of James" without her first name appearing at all. Cross-reference with the funeral home records or cemetery documentation if the obit itself doesn't give you a clear full name. The paper's print format changed over the years too. In the late 1990s they moved obituaries from the front section to a dedicated community section, which means a simple keyword search across the whole paper will undercount results from that era. If you're doing a comprehensive search for a particular surname, go through the community section specifically for the years between 1997 and 2005. That's where the bulk of them live during that period.
Get the Full Details
Preserving What You Find
Once you pull an obit, don't just screenshot it and forget about it. Screenshots degrade. Save a high-resolution scan or the original PDF if available. I use a naming convention that includes the person's full name, the date of publication, and the source: last_first_valleyindependent_YYYYMMDD. It sounds like overkill until you're juggling dozens of files and need to find one quickly. I also copy the text into a plain text file alongside the image, because image-only archives become unreadable if the hosting service changes its format or takes the content down. The Valley Independent does occasionally update their online archive. Pages get rearranged, old links break, and sometimes entire sections disappear without notice. I've lost three obituaries this way over the years. Having a local copy is the only real insurance.
What This Approach Doesn't Cover
There are gaps in the Valley Independent's obituary record that no amount of searching will fill. The paper didn't publish obituaries for every death in the area, especially in its earlier years. Some families chose to place notices only in nearby larger papers. Others arranged private services with no public announcement at all. If you hit a dead end with Valley Independent, try the county historical society, local cemetery registries, and the state vital records office. Those are separate systems and they don't always overlap with what the paper carried. Also worth noting: Valley Independent obituaries before roughly 1990 tend to be shorter and more formulaic. They usually listed the basic facts — name, age, date of death, surviving family, funeral details — but rarely included the biographical details that later editions started featuring. Don't expect rich life summaries from the 1970s and 1980s. The paper was smaller then and obituaries were often paid notices rather than editorial features, so families controlled the length and content more strictly.
