How to Navigate Times Picayune Obituaries in St. Tammany Parish
The Times-Picayune publishes obituaries for St. Tammany Parish residents on a daily basis, and finding a specific notice isn't always as straightforward as it should be. Their online archive goes back several years, but the search interface is unforgiving if you don't know how to use it properly. I've spent too many evenings helping people track down notices for family members, and most of the friction comes from avoidable mistakes at the outset. Start at NOLA.com's obituaries section, which mirrors the print publication's coverage. From there, filter by parish. St. Tammany is its own filter option alongside Orleans, Jefferson, and the other southeastern parishes. Most people miss that step and end up scrolling through hundreds of New Orleans listings when they should have narrowed the results immediately. The search bar also accepts full names, but I've found that putting the last name alone with the death year produces cleaner results than typing the complete name. The system sometimes matches partial names in ways that add noise rather than reduce it. The obituaries themselves run anywhere from three hundred words to two thousand depending on how much the family opts to include. Shorter notices are the ones most often buried in search results because they contain less keyword material. A longer memorial with biographical detail ranks higher, which is why some families choose the extended version even when it costs more. That's a practical consideration, not just sentiment.
Here is a problem I ran into recently that illustrates how tricky this can get. A friend was looking for her grandmother's notice. The grandmother had been married twice, and the obituary used her maiden name in the headline but her married name in the body text. Searching either name alone missed it. The workaround was to search by the funeral home name, which was listed in both the online notice and the paid death record from the Louisiana Department of Health. Once I had the funeral home, I cross-referenced the date range and found the notice within minutes. If you hit a dead end on a name search, pivot to the funeral home. That's the move most people don't think to make. There are a few things worth understanding about how these notices get published that aren't obvious. First, the obituary content is submitted by the funeral home, not by the family directly. The funeral director writes the draft, the family approves it, and then it goes to the paper's editorial desk for formatting. That means any errors in dates or surviving family members usually originate at the funeral home level, and corrections require going back through the same channel. You can't email the newspaper and expect a quick fix. Call the funeral home that filed the notice and ask them to submit a correction request to the editor. Second, the online archive has gaps. Notices from roughly 2016 and earlier exist, but the digitization process wasn't uniform, and some months from certain parishes are spotty. If you're researching genealogy or need a notice from before 2016, the print microfilm at the St. Tammany Public Library is still the more reliable source. The library staff can pull the exact date and page number for you, and they're generally accommodating if you explain what you need. I'd recommend calling ahead to confirm their current scanning turnaround time, which has improved in recent years but still operates on a different schedule than the online archive.
The subscription model is another hurdle. NOLA.com requires a digital subscription to access the full obituary archive, and the paywall blocks even basic search results after a certain number of free views. The daily free allowance refreshes at midnight, so if you're doing casual research, waiting until morning can reset your access. A monthly subscription runs about twenty dollars, which is reasonable if you're actively searching, but pointless if you just need one notice. In that case, the public library route is free and avoids the paywall entirely. Sometimes the information you need is in the legacy sidebar rather than the main obituary text. The legacy section includes photos, guestbook entries, and occasionally additional biographical details that didn't make the printed version. These sections are user-generated, meaning surviving family members or friends add content after publication. That can be useful, but it's also inconsistent. Some notices have extensive photo galleries; others have nothing past the original text. Don't assume the legacy section exists or that it contains anything meaningful. If you're compiling records for legal or genealogical purposes, take screenshots of everything immediately. The online platform is owned by Alden Media, and their content migration history shows that older notices have disappeared without warning during past site updates. I lost access to two obituaries I had been citing for a family history project after a platform update in early 2024. The pages returned as error codes with no recovery option. Archive what you need while you can.
Get the Full Details
For those doing serious research across multiple parishes or extended time periods, the Louisiana Division of Vital Records holds death certificates that reference the funeral home and burial location. Those certificates don't include the full obituary text, but they do provide the exact date of death and the attending funeral director's name, which feeds back into the search process I described earlier. It's a two-step method, but it resolves cases that stall at the name-search stage. The community aspect of these obituaries is real but underutilized. The guestbook function allows anyone to leave condolences, and in St. Tammany specifically, many of those messages include information about the deceased that never appears in the formal notice. Childhood friends, former coworkers, distant relatives who lost touch. Reading through the guestbook entries on an older notice can fill gaps that the official text leaves open. It takes time, and the entries are unmoderated, but they're a legitimate research resource when you're trying to reconstruct someone's life story.
