How the Times Herald Obituaries Section Actually Works
When someone in Montgomery County passes away, the family typically contacts the funeral home, and the funeral home handles the submission to the newspaper. That's the standard pipeline. But if you're trying to navigate this process yourself—either because you're helping a family that doesn't have a funeral director on speed dial, or because you're a genealogist digging through archived records—there are details most people never learn until they're standing at the counter. I've spent years tracking down death notices for family research projects, and the thing that always catches people off guard is that not every death makes it into print. The Times Herald runs what they call "obituaries" and what they actually call "death notices," and those two categories operate on completely different timelines and pricing structures. Obituaries are written pieces that families or journalists compose and submit for a higher per-line rate. Death notices are shorter, template-style announcements that cost less but have stricter word limits and tighter submission windows.
Times Herald Obituaries Norristown Honoring Montgomery County Lives Through Comprehensive Local Death Notices
The paper covers Norristown and the surrounding Montgomery County communities—Lwyn, Norristown itself, Royersford, Bridgeport, Plymouth Meeting, Audubon, Phoenixville, and points outward toward the county line. If the deceased lived just outside the coverage area in Chester or Bucks County, the Times Herald will usually decline the submission and point you toward the Daily Local or the Philadelphia Inquirer instead. I learned this the hard way when I tried to place a notice for an uncle who'd spent forty years in Norristown but whose current address at the time of death was in Upper Darby. The funeral director I was working with at the time assumed the Times would take it. It came back rejected within four hours with a generic form letter. We resubmitted to the Daily Local and got it published the next day. The submission process has moved online in recent years, which is a relief. You can fill out a digital form through the Times Herald website, attach any photographs you want included, and select your layout preferences. The form asks for the standard information: full legal name, age, date of death, surviving family members, service details, and a brief biographical sketch. There's also a field for whether the person was a veteran, which matters because military honors and service details sometimes qualify for reduced placement fees or special sections. One counter-intuitive detail that nobody tells you: submitting early in the week, ideally Tuesday or Wednesday, gives you better placement options than submitting on Thursday or Friday. The weekend editions have limited obituary pages, and newspapers prioritize Thursday and Friday deaths for Saturday publication. If a death occurs on a Monday and you submit on Tuesday, you're competing against the weekend backlog. Waiting until Thursday to submit a Friday death means your notice often gets bumped to the following Monday's paper, which is when readership drops significantly. Timing matters more than most families realize, especially if the goal is maximum visibility for the service details.
Photography is another area where people routinely overcomplicate things. The Times Herald accepts JPEG and PNG files, but the file needs to be at least 300 DPI and no larger than 5 megabytes. I've seen families send high-resolution camera originals that got compressed to uselessness by the newspaper's system, or smaller web images that came through pixelated and unprintable. The workaround is simple: export your photo at exactly 300 DPI in sRGB color space, name the file with the deceased's last name and first name, and upload it directly rather than emailing it. Email attachments get stripped or degraded during transfer. The pricing structure is not publicly listed on the website, which is unusual. You have to call the classifieds or obituary desk to get current rates. As of my last interaction with the office, death notices ran approximately $150 to $250 for a basic one-column notice of about 50 words, while full obituaries with photographs and extended biographical content could run $600 to $1,200 depending on length and placement. Prices vary by how many days you want the notice to appear—some families choose to run the same notice for two or three consecutive days, which spreads the cost but also extends the memory window for readers. There are limitations worth being honest about. The Times Herald does not publish death notices for people who died in out-of-state hospitals unless they had a documented residence in Montgomery County within the previous five years. This policy is enforced fairly strictly, and I've watched families get their submissions rejected because the deceased had been in a long-term care facility in New Jersey for eighteen months before passing, even though they maintained a primary residence in Norristown. The workaround in cases like that is to submit through the funeral home that handled the arrangements, because funeral directors know which editors will make exceptions for border-community cases and can phrase the submission to emphasize the local ties that matter.
Get the Full Details
Archival access is another practical consideration. The Times Herald keeps obituary records going back to the 1980s in digital format, but accessing them requires a subscription to their online archive or a visit to the Montgomery County Historical Society in Norristown. Genealogists often assume they can look up an ancestor's death notice through a free search engine, but the newspaper's own website only shows a limited preview of older entries before hitting a paywall. The historical society's microfilm collection is free to access and goes back further, but the records are not digitized and require an in-person visit during business hours. If you need a death notice placed urgently—say, within twenty-four hours—the best approach is to call the obituary desk directly rather than relying on the online form. Phone submissions can be processed and scheduled for the next available edition, while online forms typically go through a review queue that adds several hours. The desk phone number is listed on the classifieds page of the Times Herald website, and the staff there are generally helpful if you're polite and prepared with all the required information before you call. Having the death certificate number, the funeral home contact, and the complete list of surviving family members ready before you dial will cut the call time in half and reduce the chance of errors that delay publication.
