The Muleshoe Legacy Unveiling The Obituaries Of A Bygone Era

Searching For Historical Obituaries In West Texas Is More Complicated Than You Think

I spent about three weeks last year tracking down obituaries from the Muleshoe area spanning the 1930s through the 1970s, and the process was nowhere near as straightforward as people assume. Most folks who start this kind of research think they will just find digitized newspapers on some free website and be done. That is not how it works out in practice. The core challenge here is that many newspapers from that era simply were never digitized at all. The Muleshoe Leader, the primary paper for Hudspeth County, ran obituaries regularly, but its archive only goes back so far in whatever digitized form exists. I found maybe 40 percent of the obituaries I was looking for through any online source. The rest required either visiting the records in person or having someone physically go through microfilm at a local library or the state archives. There is a secondary issue that most researchers overlook entirely. Obituaries from that period were not consistently published. Some families could not afford them. Others died during hospital stays without community notice, and the undertaker simply did not file a notice. You end up with real gaps in the record that have nothing to do with your research skills. I encountered this when searching for a great-uncle who died in 1952. There was no obituary anywhere because the family had just moved to the area and had no local ties. I found him through a funeral record at the El Paso County Courthouse instead.

The El Paso Public Library holds microfilm for several regional papers, including the Muleshoe section, and their reading room is open Monday through Friday from nine to five. You need to call ahead and request the specific reel you need because they do not maintain an online finding aid that precise. Budget about two to three hours per month of paper you want to search through. Microfilm readers are temperamental and the film itself often has scratches or fading that make certain dates completely illegible. Another thing I learned the hard way involves cross-referencing the Texas Death Index with whatever obituary fragments you do find. The index can confirm a death date and location, but it will not tell you anything about the person's life or surviving family. A death certificate from the Texas Department of State Health Services contains significantly more detail, but there is a three-year waiting period before you can request copies for non-immediate family members. I needed a certificate for a third cousin once removed, and the wait plus the mail-in processing time added roughly ten weeks to my project. Rushing the request by claiming immediate family status is how you get flagged and denied. If you are doing this research for a living or for a serious family history project, I would recommend setting up a spreadsheet before you touch any primary source. I tracked name, date of death, source type, location of record, legibility quality, and any gaps I noted. This took me about twenty minutes to set up but saved me hours later when I was trying to figure out whether a name appearing in one obituary matched a death index entry from three months earlier. Without that system, I was going in circles comparing faded microfilm text against printed certificates that looked similar but belonged to different people.

The biggest mistake I see people make is assuming online databases are complete. FamilySearch has some Hudspeth County records, but they are incomplete and often mis-indexed. I caught three errors where the index listed a death year that was two years off from the actual obituary date. Ancestry has some Texas obituary collections, but coverage is spotty for smaller west Texas communities. NewspaperArchive.com also has gaps in this region. Do not treat any single online source as authoritative. If you want to dig deeper, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in Austin maintains a massive collection of regional newspaper files. They have a reference desk that can look things up for you if you send a written request with specific dates and names. Response time is usually two to three weeks. It is not fast, but it saves you a drive to El Paso if you are coming from elsewhere in the state. Sometimes the best source for missing obituaries turns out to be church records. Many families in the Muleshoe area attended First Baptist Church or St. Joseph Catholic Church, and both kept burial registers that sometimes included brief death notices when the newspaper failed to run one. I found two obituaries this way that I would never have located through any other method. Both churches require appointments and a signed release form before they let you examine their records. Plan accordingly.

One final note on tools. If you need to read microfilm yourself, bring your own glasses with a strong prescription if you have one. The library has a magnifier, but it is shared and often occupied. Also bring a small notebook and a pencil. The reading room is strict about electronics being put away while film is running. I wasted about forty-five minutes trying to photograph illegible sections with my phone before someone pointed out that the actually provides paper and pen for note-taking. Cheap lesson.