How I Deal With Obituaries At The Hays Post
I've been reading the Hays Post for longer than I care to admit, and somewhere around 2018 I started noticing a pattern that didn't sit right with me. The obituary section was full of names, dates, and surviving family members, but it rarely captured who these people actually were beyond the checklist format. So I started paying closer attention, and eventually I started reaching out to families to help fill in the gaps. Here's what I've learned about making these notices actually mean something instead of reading like a legal document. The standard format requires a name, age, date of death, surviving relatives, and where the service will be held. That's the baseline. But the people who shaped this community don't fit neatly into that template. A nurse who volunteered at the hospital for thirty years gets reduced to "she was a dedicated professional." A veteran who coached youth football for decades becomes "he loved his family and his community." Those phrases are technically true and completely empty. I spent months trying to figure out how to approach families without coming across as intrusive. The first time I tried this, I called a woman whose husband had just passed and asked if I could sit with her for twenty minutes to get some real stories. She hung up on me. I felt like an asshole for a week. What I eventually figured out was that the approach needed to be different. I started leaving handwritten notes at funeral homes with my number and a brief explanation of what I was trying to do. Within three weeks, two families reached out. That was the turning point.
The key is understanding that families are going through something awful when they're filling out obituary forms. The newspaper staff is often too backed up to ask follow-up questions. So the work falls to people who are willing to do it gently and without making it about themselves. I keep a folder of questions that actually work. "What was he like on a Tuesday afternoon?" "Did she have a hobby that drove her family crazy?" "What's the one thing people always forget about her?" These questions pull out details that become the backbone of a real tribute. I ran into a specific problem last year that I wish I'd been better prepared for. A family provided what they thought was a complete obituary, but several of the details about the person's military service were incorrect. The deceased had served in the Army National Guard, not the regular Army, and the families hadn't realized the distinction mattered. They wanted everything to sound impressive. I had the raw discharge papers from the family member who'd kept them in a drawer, but going back to correct it meant reopening a conversation they'd already had and finalized. I called the editor directly, explained the situation, and we ran a corrected version in the Sunday edition with a small note acknowledging the update. It took an extra forty-five minutes of work and embarrassed the family slightly, but the accuracy mattered more. That's the tradeoff you have to live with. There's also the issue of people who don't leave much behind on paper. I worked with a family last fall where the deceased had lived in Hays for only eight years, had no children, and his closest friends were spread across three states. The obituary was going to be three sentences long. I suggested they reach out to the VFW hall he frequented, the diner where he ate breakfast every morning, and the man he'd helped care for during his final illness. Each of those people contributed a paragraph. The final piece was four times longer than the original draft and infinitely more honest about who he was.
Not every attempt works. Some families want the standard format and nothing more, and that's fair. You push too hard and you lose their trust entirely. Some people move away and can't be reached for follow-up details. Sometimes the surviving family members disagree about what should be included, and you end up navigating grief politics that have nothing to do with you. These things happen regularly and there's no clean workaround for them. What does work is keeping a simple system. I maintain a spreadsheet tracking each obituary I touch with the date, the family contact, what details were confirmed, what's still pending, and which local organizations might have relevant stories. It takes about ten minutes per entry to set up properly. When you're juggling multiple cases, that organization prevents you from asking the same question twice or missing a detail someone already shared. If you want to do this yourself, start by volunteering at the local historical society or the library's genealogy desk. You'll learn how to read old records, verify dates, and understand what sources are reliable. That skill set transfers directly. You'll also meet people who've been doing this for decades and who know every family in Reno County by name. Those connections are worth more than any technique you could pick up from a website.
Get the Full Details
The process usually takes between two and six hours per obituary depending on how much research is involved and how cooperative the family is. Simple cases with complete information can be done in under an hour. Cases involving veterans, immigrants, or people with complicated family structures run longer. Don't try to rush it. Incomplete or inaccurate obituaries get corrected later, and that's worse for everyone involved. I still think about the people whose stories never get told because nobody bothered to ask. That's the real reason I keep doing this. The work is slow and sometimes uncomfortable and it doesn't lead anywhere measurable. But when someone reads a correctly written obituary and recognizes their parent or their neighbor or themselves in the details, that matters. It's the only metric that does.
