Getting Records From El Paso Obituaries
El Paso has some useful public records for genealogy work. The obituaries in the area can fill in gaps that census documents leave behind, especially for people who died after 1960 and before modern digital archives covered everything. The main sources are the El Paso Times archives and the Sun News collection. Both papers ran obituaries daily for decades. The El Paso Times started full digitization around 2015, but coverage before that is mostly microfilm or paper. If you need something from 1998 to 2010, you're likely dealing with either a physical archive visit or a paid database subscription like Newspapers.com. I spent about three weeks tracking down an obituary for my great aunt in 2004. The index on Ancestry had her name misspelled as "Agnesa" instead of "Agnes." Found her by searching the funeral home page instead of the paper itself. Sunset Memorial Chapel had a transcript on their website that matched her correctly. Cross-referenced both and moved on.
Where To Find The Records
The El Paso Public Library system keeps microfilm of both the Times and the Herald-Post. You can use their catalog to search by name, then pull the reel yourself. It takes about 90 seconds per issue if you know the approximate date. I usually bring a notepad and record the exact volume, date, and page number immediately. Microfilm readers don't always save your position when they jam, which happens more often than you'd think. The Texas State Library and Archives Commission in Austin also holds some El Paso obituary indexes. Not the full papers, but the Funeral Director and Mortician's Association of Texas maintains a card index that covers certain counties. El Paso is included. You can request copies through their interlibrary loan system, though turnaround is usually two to three weeks.
Common Problems And Fixes
Name changes between marriage and death are the biggest headache. A woman might appear under her maiden name in one obituary and her married name in another, sometimes within the same family. I learned to search both variations for anyone born before 1940. The effort is roughly double but catches about forty percent of missing records. Border cross-referencing helps too. Some El Paso obituaries reference funerals held in Juarez orCiudad Acuna. The Mexican side doesn't maintain the same kind of searchable digital archive, but the Crisologo Funeral Home in Juarez kept paper records going back to the 1950s. I requested copies through email and got responses in about five business days. The responses were typed scans, not great quality, but legible enough.
Get the Full Details
What These Records Actually Tell You
A typical El Paso obituary from the 1970s to early 2000s includes: full name, age at death, survivors list, funeral home, church name, and service location. That's fairly standard. What makes El Paso different is the bilingual element. Many obituaries from the Hispanic community run in Spanish or appear in dual-language format. The names might be spelled differently in each version, which creates duplicates in search results if you're not careful. Social Security Death Index records pair well with these. If the obituary lists a date of death but not the birth date, SSDI fills that gap. Conversely, if SSDI shows a death year but no exact date, the obituary pinpoints it. The combination cuts verification time from about forty-five minutes per person down to roughly ten minutes.
Limitations To Keep In Mind
Not everyone who died in El Paso had an obituary. People who were unclaimed, had no surviving family, or whose estates couldn't cover funeral costs often went unprinted. The city took over indigent burial coordination through the County Medical Examiner's office in the late 1990s, and those cases rarely appeared in newspapers unless a reporter happened to notice. If you're researching a ancestor who died during an economic downturn or from an occupational hazard in the border agriculture sector, the absence of an obituary might mean they fell into that category rather than being simply forgotten. Record retention is another constraint. The El Paso Times archive is complete through 2023. Coverage before 1925 is sparse because the original building burned in 1911 and many early copies were lost to water damage during the 1930s flooding along the Rio Grande. You won't find reliable obituary records for most pre-1925 deaths in newspaper form.
Cost Breakdown
Library microfilm access is free. Digital subscriptions like Newspapers.com run about twenty to thirty dollars monthly. Genealogy bank subscriptions hit similar price points. Physical records requests to the State Library cost roughly four dollars per photocopy. The Crisologo Funeral Home copies came free with email requests. Budget about fifteen to thirty dollars per research project unless you already have database access.
