How to Pull Real History Out of Local Newspaper Obituaries
Obituaries in regional papers like the Idaho Falls Post Register are some of the most underrated primary sources available for genealogy and local history. Most people treat them as death notices with optional biographical fluff. That is wrong. A well-researched obituary from this paper between roughly 1920 and 1980 can contain birth dates, parents names, military service records, club memberships, surviving relatives spread across multiple states, and sometimes even cause of death or hospital location. The problem is that the information is buried under decades of microfilm degradation and inconsistent editorial standards. Here is how you actually do this work. The first thing to understand is that the Post Register obituary archive is not fully digitized in any clean, searchable format. You will find scattered digitized issues on Ancestry.com and FamilySearch, but the coverage is spotty. The real material lives on microfilm at the Bonneville County Historical Society and the Idaho State Historical Society microfilm room in Boise. If you cannot travel there, you can request copies through their interlibrary loan system or hire a local researcher on a per-hour basis. I spent three weeks in 2019 tracking a single family line through Post Register obits spanning 1942 to 1978. What I learned is that the editorial standards shifted dramatically around 1965. Before that date, obituaries were typically written by the newspaper staff from brief family submissions and ran two to four paragraphs. After 1965, paid death notices became common and the real story obituaries got shorter or disappeared entirely. This means your research strategy has to change mid-century. Pre-1965 obits require you to read between the lines for facts the family omitted. Post-1965 obits are often just lists of survivors and service details, which are equally useful but in a different way.
A practical workflow: First, determine the approximate death date from the Social Security Death Index or the Utah Department of Health Death Index, which covers Idaho records. Then narrow your microfilm search to a ten-day window around that date. Obits often appeared one to three days after death, sometimes on the same day for quick burials. Scan every page. A family might publish a separate death notice on one page and a full obituary on another, and they will not always be adjacent. When you find the obituary, extract everything methodically. Do not just pull the death date. Look for the mother's maiden name, which is frequently included but easy to miss if you are scanning quickly. Check for siblings mentioned as predeceased or surviving. Those names give you siblings' birth years and often point you toward census records. The church affiliation is another key data point. An obituary mentioning St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Idaho Falls narrows your ancestor to a specific community network that shows up in other records like church registers and cemetery transcriptions. One thing nobody warns you about is the indexing gap. FamilySearch and Ancestry have indexed many Post Register obituaries, but the indexing quality varies wildly. I encountered a case where my subject's obituary was listed under the wrong surname because the indexer misread a faded newspaper column. The actual obituary was sitting right there in the correct issue. My workaround was to pull the full issue image directly rather than relying on any search result, then use the newspaper's table of contents page to navigate to the obituary section. This added maybe twenty minutes to the process but saved me from chasing a dead index entry.
The deeper layer: Once you have a solid set of obituaries, cross-reference them with the Idaho Falls city directories, which are available through the University of Idaho Library digital collections. City directories list every household member with their occupation and street address. An obituary might mention a widow living on East Centre Street. The 1952 directory tells you she was listed as Mrs. Harold Jenkins, employed as a bookkeeper at the local bank, and living with her daughter Mary. That single directory entry connects three people who might otherwise remain isolated names in a family tree. Cemetery records are the next step. Idahoe Falls has several cemeteries, and the Idaho State Historical Society maintains cemetery transcript projects. The Post Register often publishes the cemetery location in the obituary, but not always. When it does not, you can infer the location from the funeral home listed. Hagan Funeral Home handled most Idaho Falls cases in the mid-century period, and their records are partially archived at the Bonneville County courthouse. You can request access in person, though be prepared for a handwritten ledger system that requires patience. There are real limitations to this approach. Microfilm from the 1910s and 1920s is often damaged by acidic newsprint degradation. Titles can be completely illegible on certain rolls. The Post Register also suspended publication for short periods during economic downturns and World War II rationing, creating gaps that no amount of searching will fill. If your ancestor died during one of those gaps, you will need to look at surrounding counties' papers or state-level publications like the Idaho Statesman in Boise, which occasionally carried Idaho Falls death notices.
Get the Full Details
Another limitation is that obituaries reflect what the family chose to share, not necessarily what happened. I found an obituary that listed a man as surviving his wife and five children, but census records showed he had been divorced twice and had three children from a previous marriage who were deliberately excluded from the notice. Genealogists sometimes treat obituary survivor lists as definitive family records. They are not. They are curated family statements with their own agendas. Always verify against census, vital records, and court documents when possible. The most efficient way to begin this research today is through the Idaho Statesman and Post Register obituary databases on Ancestry.com, which give you a rough map of where to look. Then move to the microfilm for the full text. Budget about four to six hours per major family line if you are working remotely through scans, or one to two hours if you can visit the microfilm rooms in person. The difference is mostly in image quality and the ability to flip through pages quickly. If you want the raw microfilm catalog for the Bonneville County Historical Society, it is available on their website or by calling their reference desk. They do not charge for personal genealogical research done on-site. Copies run about fifty cents per page. The Idaho State Historical Society charges a similar rate for their Boise microfilm room, and they offer reproduction services by mail for about twelve dollars per roll if you cannot travel.
The work is tedious but the returns are disproportionate. A single Post Register obituary can unlock three census records, two cemetery transcriptions, and a handful of previously unknown relatives. That is why people spend weekends on microfilm readers instead of using digital databases. The digital versions are convenient but they miss the contextual material that makes local obituaries valuable: the neighboring ads, the layout, the editorial notes, the way a family's social standing is reflected in how much space the newspaper gives them. None of that survives in a cropped digital thumbnail.
