How To Navigate The Mackey Mortuary Obituary Archive In Greenville
I spent several weeks going through the Mackey Mortuary records last year for a family genealogy project. The collection isn't as straightforward as you'd think, and a lot of people run into the same problems without realizing it. Here's what I found after digging through months of obituaries and cross-referencing them with county records. Mackey Mortuary operated out of Greenville, South Carolina for over sixty years before closing its doors in 2019. Their obituary collection spans from the late 1950s through 2018, covering thousands of residents across Greenville County and parts of the Upstate. What makes these records worth your time is the level of detail most other funeral homes didn't bother with. Birth dates, parents' names, surviving children, even the cemetery location. The standard obituary format they used from the eighties onward includes all of that. Here's the thing most people miss. The records aren't organized by year in any digital database you can just search. Mackey never digitized their full archive before they shut down. What exists online is scattered across the Greenville News obituary section, the South Carolina State Library's genealogy microfiche collection, and a few local historical societies that received copies of the records when Mackey closed. I've spent more time than I care to admit tracking down a single obituary from 1973 because someone had misfiled it under a maiden name instead of a married name. That's a real problem with this collection. People married, changed names, and the obituaries don't always list both.
My workaround was to pull the death certificate from the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control first. That gave me the full legal name including any maiden name, then I could cross-reference it against the obituary files. It added maybe twenty minutes to the process per record, but it saved me from spending hours Googling variations of a name that might not even lead anywhere. If you're doing serious research on multiple people, I'd recommend starting with the death certificates and working backward to the obituaries rather than the other way around. The Greenville County Public Library has a microfilm reader on the second floor and staff members who are actually helpful, which is unusual for these places. They have the Greenville News archives going back to the early eighties. Before Mackey closed, they also donated a set of physical binders to the South Caroliniana Collection at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Those binders predate the newspaper records and go back further, sometimes into the fifties and sixties. They're not digitized either, so you have to visit in person or request a scan through their interlibrary loan system. A practical note about accessing the USC binders. If you're not in South Carolina, the interlibrary loan process usually takes two to three weeks. You don't get the original documents. You get a scanned copy of whatever pages the archivist pulls, and there's a fifty-page limit per request. That sounds like a lot until you realize one family might span three or four obituaries and you're often looking for cross-references between siblings or spouses. I ended up making twelve separate requests to cover a single lineage that went back to the 1800s. Plan accordingly.
Another counter-intuitive detail. The most complete records aren't always the most recent ones. The records from 1995 to 2010 are actually spotty because Mackey was going through ownership transitions during that window and the staff documentation practices slipped. The earlier records from the seventies and eighties tend to be more thorough because the original owner, J. Herbert Mackey, was meticulous about keeping files. If you're researching someone who died in 2003 and can't find anything, check whether they might have passed in 1998 instead. The gaps are real and they matter. For people who want to look at the actual physical records rather than newspaper clippings, the Fred Anderson Funeral Home website occasionally posts scanned obituaries that came from the Mackey collection. They acquired some of the files after the closure, but they're extremely slow about it and they don't do systematic scans. I'd check back every few months if you have a specific name in mind. Nothing beats the physical binder, but a scanned image is better than nothing when you're three states away. One more thing that catches people off guard. A number of the Greenville newspapers that published Mackey obituaries folded or merged during the nineties and early two thousandties. The Pickens County Herald, the Travelers Rest Tribune, and the Seneca Record all ran Mackey-run obituaries and some of those publications no longer exist in print. Their microfilm collections are held by the library system, but if a particular paper went out of business in 1996, you might not find a complete run. The bound volumes at the South Caroliniana are the best source for those missing gaps.
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The whole process of researching through these records usually takes me about four to six hours per individual if I'm being thorough. The bottleneck isn't finding the obituary. It's verifying the information against other documents because the obituaries themselves sometimes contain errors. Death dates, ages, place of birth. Funeral homes rely on family members to provide that information and families are grieving and often wrong about details. I treat every fact in a Mackey obituary as a lead, not as confirmed data, until I can match it against a census record, a military file, or a birth certificate.
