What This Project Actually Is
The Silent Voices Uncovering The Stories Behind Flagstaffs Recent Obituaries is a local initiative that takes the standard obituary format and runs with it. Instead of just listing dates, employers, and surviving relatives, the project tracks down friends, coworkers, and neighbors to fill in what actually happened in these people's lives. Most obituaries in the Register-Herald or Coconino Sun are two paragraphs of polished genericness. This project tries to get past that. I've been tracking Flagstaff obituaries for about four years now, mostly because I found myself frustrated with how thin the public record gets for people who didn't have large families or money to pay for expanded notices. The obit section became my way of understanding who was actually living here.
The Silent Voices Uncovering The Stories Behind Flagstaffs Recent Obituaries
Here's how the core method works, and what you need to do if you want to replicate this in any town. First, you pull the obituaries. In Flagstaff, that means the Register-Herald website, the Coconino Sun archive, and obits that run through funeral homes like Coconino Memorial Chapel and Pine Hill Funeral Care. Some also appear in the Arizona Republic's statewide obit section. I maintain a running spreadsheet with the date, full name, age, and a one-line summary of what the obit itself says. This takes about twenty minutes per week. Then you identify the people worth contacting. Not every obit warrants this. I focus on people who lived in the area for at least ten years, had some community presence, or died under circumstances that suggest there's a story the standard notice isn't telling. A 19-year-old college student who died of an overdose has a different investigative angle than a 78-year-old retired mine worker. Both deserve attention, but the research path is completely different.
For the community-connected person, you call the funeral home listed in the obit and ask for the family's preferred contact method. Some families put email addresses directly in the notice. Some list a pastor. A few give nothing, and you're left working from public records and old social media accounts. I once spent three weeks trying to track down a neighbor of a man who died alone in his apartment off Route 66. The obit said he was a former Navajo County sheriff's deputy. I called the retirements office, then the current patrol union rep, then a bartender who'd served him for fifteen years at a place that no longer exists. Found him through a guy who runs a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Williams. That kind of work is the reality of this. Interviews are usually done over the phone or in person if someone is local. I don't record without permission. I take handwritten notes on a yellow legal pad and type them up later that evening. People open up more when they think you're just having a conversation instead of conducting a formal interview. The writing itself is straightforward narrative. No dramatic framing, no forced profundity. Just the facts gathered, arranged chronologically or thematically depending on what the source material supports. Most pieces end up between 600 and 1200 words.
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Where This Method Breaks Down
I need to be honest about the limitations because nobody talking about this will. The biggest problem is family cooperation. Roughly half the families I approach either don't respond or explicitly say no. This is normal. Grief makes people withdraw. Some families have real reasons for wanting privacy, and those reasons are usually legitimate even when they feel frustrating from the outside. Second, the time investment is real. A single well-researched piece from scratch takes me between six and twelve hours of actual work. That includes the initial research, the calls, the interviews, the writing, and the fact-checking. You cannot scale this quickly without compromising quality.
Third, you will encounter people who don't want to talk about the deceased. I had a woman call me after I'd published a piece about her brother, asking me to take it down because "he wouldn't have wanted this." There's no legal requirement to remove it if everything is accurate and sourced, but the ethical weight of that conversation is heavy. I kept the piece up. I also felt awful about it for months. Financially, this model doesn't work well on its own. Local newspapers don't pay enough for long-form obituary deep-dives. The project survives mostly through small donations and occasional grant funding from local arts councils. If you're considering doing this as a primary income source, look elsewhere.
A Counter-Intuitive Thing I Learned
Most people assume the best sources for these stories are family members. They're not. Family members are often the most unreliable narrators because they're filtering everything through their own grief, guilt, or idealization. The people who give you the most useful material are usually acquaintances, former coworkers, or people who had a minor but genuine connection to the deceased. A barista who served someone for three years will tell you more about their daily habits than a nephew who saw them twice a year at Christmas. Another thing: the obituary itself is often the worst source of factual information. Dates are wrong. Employment histories are condensed or embellished. Addresses are approximate. I treat every detail in a printed obit as requiring verification unless it's something trivial like the name of a surviving sibling.
What You Need to Start
A spreadsheet. A phone. A willingness to take rejection. Access to local newspaper archives, which in Flagstaff means the Register-Herald site and the Coconino Sun archive. Some people use Newspapers.com, but the local papers are more complete for smaller Arizona towns. That's it. No specialized training required. No special equipment. Just the time to make the calls and the patience to sit with people who are talking about someone they loved and lost. The work is slow and often emotionally exhausting. The output is meaningful to the people who read it and to the communities where these stories finally get told properly. I do it because the alternative, which is letting people vanish into two paragraphs of boilerplate, feels worse.
