Where to Find Them and How to Actually Use Them
Most people think looking up old obituaries in Twin Falls means walking into the Times-Bulletin newsroom and asking nicely. That used to work. Now the records go through the Jerome County Library's local history room and a handful of digitized databases. If you want to do this properly, here is what you actually need to know before you waste a weekend. The core sources break down into three buckets. The primary one is the Times-Bulletin archive, which has been digitized going back to the 1990s through the library system and paid services like Ancestry and Newspapers.com. Going further back, you are dealing with microfilm at the local history room on Main Street. Before digitization kicked in around 1997, the paper ran obituaries on page 18 or 19 of the Thursday and Sunday editions. The format was rigid: full name, age, surviving family members, and the funeral home handling arrangements. The second source is the Jerome County Courthouse, which holds death certificates and burial records. These are public records but they do not automatically match up with what you see in the newspaper. A lot of people miss this gap. The obituary lists who the family wanted the public to know about. The death certificate shows the actual cause of death, the informant's name, and sometimes addresses that never appeared in print. When you cross-reference both, the picture gets a lot clearer.
The third source most genealogy beginners don't think about is the cemetery records. Twin Falls has several burial grounds beyond the main ones people expect. St. Francis Cemetery, Sunset Memorial Gardens, and the older plots around the rural Jerome County area all have separate record-keeping. Some of these are maintained by the city, some by private families or religious organizations. The names on headstones sometimes differ from the newspaper versions — married women listed under maiden names, children whose ages were rounded, or adults who went by nicknames that the obituary never mentioned. I ran into a specific problem a couple years ago that perfectly illustrates why you cannot trust a single source. I was tracking a family line through the 1942 obituaries and found a man listed as "James R. Thornton, age 67, born in Illinois." The death certificate at the courthouse had the same name but listed his birth year as 1881, which would make him 61, not 67. The funeral home records showed he had served in the Navy under a slightly different spelling — Thompson with a P — and the 1940 census had him filed under that spelling. The obituary itself had been transcribed by a grieving son who did not know the exact birth year and relied on memory. Working around this meant pulling the 1930 census, the military service record from the National Archives, and the gravestone photograph from Find A Grave, then confirming the correct spelling through the Navy enlistment papers. It added three days to what should have been a two-hour lookup. Here is the practical workflow that actually saves time. Start with theobituary index if your database has one — Newspapers.com and Ancestry both offer searchable indexes for Idaho papers. Pull the full clipping, then immediately grab the corresponding death certificate number from the courthouse records. Don't flip back and forth between sites. Write down the certificate number, the funeral home name, and any address mentioned. Then check the cemetery database for that person's burial location. Most of the time, the funeral home listed in the obituary kept records that survived and are available through the family or the historical society.
One counter-intuitive thing about these records: the most informative obituaries are often the shortest ones. A detailed, multi-column piece with church information and long lists of survivors usually comes from a family that had the means and motivation to write it themselves. A three-sentence notice typed by the funeral home tends to be more factual because there is less room for error or embellishment. I have found more accurate birth dates and parent names in bare-bones notices than in the elaborate ones. The long obituaries are better for understanding social connections and community standing. The short ones are better for raw genealogical data. Another thing people get wrong is assuming the date on the obituary matches the date of death. In Twin Falls, as everywhere else, the newspaper often prints the notice one or two days after publication, and sometimes the funeral happens before the obituary runs. If you are working with timelines — say, tracking migration patterns or employment history — use the date of death from the certificate, not the publication date of the notice. The difference matters more than you would expect when you are piecing together a sequence of events. There are real limitations to keep in mind. Pre-1920 records are sparse for smaller communities like Twin Falls because the national death registration system was not fully implemented until the 1920s. Before that, many deaths in Jerome County went unrecorded at the state level, and the newspaper coverage was inconsistent. You will hit dead ends regularly, especially for children under age five and for people who died outside the county. The hospital and clinic records from that era are scattered across different institutions, some of which have been closed or merged.
Get the Full Details
If you are doing serious research, the free route goes through the Jerome County Library's local history database, which includes scanned microfilm images and a basic index. For deeper work, a paid subscription to Newspapers.com or Ancestry's U.S. Newspaper Collection will cut your search time significantly. The library also has a card catalog of funeral home records that predate the digitized articles. Those cards are small and handwritten, organized alphabetically by surname, and they fill several boxes in the archives room. They are not searchable online. If you plan to use them, call ahead and confirm the archivist is on shift. The hardest obituaries to work with are the ones from the 1918 influenza epidemic period. Thousands of deaths hit the area at once, and the paper was overwhelmed. Some notices ran only with initials, some were grouped into lists without full details, and a few were omitted entirely due to paper shortages. When you encounter gaps in that window, the Red Cross records and the county health department reports from 1918 to 1920 become the secondary source you need to fall back on. Bottom line: the obituaries are a starting point, not an endpoint. They tell you who died, roughly when, and who was left behind. They do not reliably tell you where someone was born, what they did for work, or how they moved through the area. You have to pull the census records, the property deeds, and the court documents to fill in the gaps. The ones who treat the obituary as the final answer usually end up with a family tree full of plausible but unverified connections.
