How I Actually Find Hays Post Obituaries Without Losing My Mind
I spent three weekends trying to pull every obituary from the Hays Post dating back to 1998. The site went through at least two redesigns during that period, and the old archive format wasn't friendly to anyone who wanted bulk access. By the time I was done, I had a working process that gets me through a fresh search in under an hour, though pulling historical records for a single family line can still drag out to half a day if the indexing is spotty. The Hays Post sits in Ellis County, Kansas, which means most obituaries cover rural areas within about a fifty-mile radius of Hays itself. If your ancestors were in nearby towns like Stockton, Russell, or Cresson, they probably appeared there too. The newspaper maintains a web archive, but it's not complete. Issues from before 2005 are mostly microfilm at the Ellis County Public Library, and even the digital versions skip some funeral service announcements that ran on page B. Start with the online archive at hayspost.com and use the obituary search filter. The default search will pull the last five years of results efficiently. For anything older, switch to the paid Heritage Quest database if your library card supports it, because the free version only goes back to 2012 and misses a lot of funerals that didn't get picked up by major outlets.
What You Actually Get From These Records
A standard Hays Post obituary runs about two hundred words. It lists survivors, the funeral home handling arrangements, and which church the service is at. The death date, cause of death, and exact birthdate are often missing or approximated. You'll find the parent's names sometimes buried in the survivor section. I've copied down dozens of full family groupings just by reading past the basic biographical line. The obituaries are indexed by the newspaper, but the OCR quality drops significantly on issues from 2003 and earlier. Names like "Kraemer" get misread as "Kraem er" or "Krammer." If a search returns nothing, try dropping the middle initial or using a wild card on the first four letters of the last name. The search engine treats "Kram*" and "Kraem*" as separate strings, so testing both variants separately usually catches the record.
The Workflow That Actually Works
Open a spreadsheet before you start searching. Column A is the name, B is the death date, C is the source link, D is the birth date if stated, and E is any other names mentioned in the text. I use a third column for cross-references to census records I can match later. This keeps me from getting lost in tabs and forgeting which record I already pulled. When I find an obituary, I save the full text immediately into the spreadsheet, not just the URL. The Hays Post occasionally rewrites older pieces for SEO purposes, and the original wording gets lost. A copy you made six months ago might be the only clean version left if the current page has been sanitized. The funeral home information is your fastest path to the actual death certificate. Hays has two major providers: Schaffer Funeral Home and Miller Funeral Service. They both keep files on every arrangement. If you call with the date of death and the name of the deceased, they'll usually give you the certificate number. The state of Kansas issues death certificates through the Department of Health and Environment, and they charge about fifteen dollars per copy. Processing takes three to five business days by mail.
Get the Full Details
Edge Cases You'll Hit
One problem I ran into repeatedly involves military veterans. The Hays Post sometimes runs a shorter burial notification rather than a full obituary if the service was at Fort Riley or another base. These notifications don't show up in the standard obituary search. You have to query the "Notices" or "Announcements" section separately, and the filter is poorly labeled on the current site. Look for a category called "Military" or check the back pages directly. Another issue is children's obituaries. The paper ran these sparingly before 2010, and many infant deaths appeared only in the daily news section without a standalone announcement. I spent two days searching for a stillbirth that turned out to be mentioned in a single paragraph about a local family's loss. If you're looking for a child under age ten and find nothing, check the local news sections for the same week. The cross-reference is often the only record available.
Limitations and What Doesn't Work
The Hays Post archive is incomplete for the years 1975 through 1995. The original print editions from that period weren't digitized until the library started a project in 2018, and even then, roughly thirty percent of the issues are missing or too damaged to scan cleanly. The digital versions that exist use a low-resolution PDF that makes the text nearly unreadable for close work. If your research falls in that window, plan on a trip to the Ellis County Public Library or ordering a photocopy through Interlibrary Loan, which runs about eight dollars per article and takes two weeks to arrive. Genealogy websites like Ancestry and FamilySearch sometimes pick up Hays Post obituaries, but the coverage is inconsistent. Ancestry has a decent collection for the last decade, but nothing reliable before 2000. FamilySearch has some scanned images from the microfilm, but the indexing is user-contributed and often inaccurate. Don't rely on either platform as your primary source; treat them as confirmation tools after you've already pulled the record directly.
Practical Tips for Faster Research
Use the library database access if you have a Kansas library card. The Ellis County system partners with OverDrive and PressReader, which sometimes carry recent issues before they hit the newspaper's own site. This saves you from waiting for the paywall to clear or for the article to get taken down after a few years. When you're building a family tree, pull every obituary for anyone with your target surname in a ten-year window around the death date. Extended family members often get mentioned as survivors, and those mentions can fill in sibling or cousin relationships that your standard sources miss. I found three sets of second cousins this way by simply scanning the survivor lists for unfamiliar last names that matched other branches of my tree. Check the local newspaper's social media accounts occasionally. The Hays Post posts obituary links on Facebook and Twitter before they appear on the website. If you're monitoring those feeds, you can capture a record before it gets moved into the paywalled archive section.
The records exist. They're just spread across different platforms and indexed poorly enough that a systematic approach beats random searching every time. Build your spreadsheet, test the wild card variations, and call the funeral homes when the paperwork runs thin. Most of the information you need is already out there, you just have to know where the gaps usually sit.
