Accessing Local Obituary Archives for Research Purposes
Amarillo has several public resources for tracking death notices and obituaries, and the most complete collection comes through the Amarillo Globe-News digital archive. The paper has published obituaries since the early 1900s, and their online archive goes back to 1996 for full-text searches. If you are looking into family history or local records, this is where you start. The Globe-News archive is accessible through their website with a subscription, but there are free workarounds if you know what you are doing. You can access older issues through the Portal to Texas History, which partners with the Bullock Texas State History Museum and the Texas Digital Newspaper Program. Those digitized pages go back further than the commercial site, sometimes to the late 1800s for select runs. I spent about three weeks last year tracking down a great-uncle who died in Potter County in 1974. The digital subscription version only had the text from 1996 onward, so I had to go through microfilm at the Amarillo Public Library downtown. The librarian pulled the right month from the 16mm reels. It took about twenty minutes once they located the right issue. Without going in person, that obituary would have been a gap in the record.
There is a specific problem people run into when searching the Globe archive. Name variations. A person listed as "Robert James Smith" in the death certificate might appear as "Bob J. Smith" in the obituary, or "R. J. Smith" in the index. The database indexes sometimes pull names from different parts of the article. My workaround was to search by date range first, then scan the actual page images rather than relying on the keyword search results. Going straight to the PDF of the November 12, 1974 edition turned up the notice on page 14 within five minutes. Searching the name directly returned zero hits because the index had tagged him under a different spelling variant. The Texas Department of State Health Services maintains a central death registry, but those records are sealed for fifty years under Texas law. That means any obituary research before the mid-1970s will almost always point you back to newspaper archives or county clerk records. After that window, the vital statistics records become accessible with a qualifying relationship to the deceased. County clerk offices in Potter and Carson counties hold probate records that sometimes include death-related documents. These are separate from the obituaries themselves but can confirm dates and surviving family members when the newspaper notice is sparse. You can request copies in person or by mail. The cost is usually one dollar per page for standard copies, and processing takes about three business days if you mail the request.
One thing the Globe archive does not do well is cover rural deaths outside the main city limits. If someone died in a small town like Panhandle or Canadian, the notice might have run in a different publication or not at all. I ran into this when researching a family line that lived near the Armstrong County line. The Globe had nothing. The Canyon News covered that area, and a quick call to their office confirmed they had the 1968 notice on file. Checking neighboring county papers should be part of your standard process, not an afterthought. For anyone doing this kind of research regularly, I recommend keeping a spreadsheet with three columns: name, date of death, and source location. It sounds obvious, but you will lose track of which archive you pulled a record from within a few weeks. Tagging each entry with the specific reel number or URL saves you from re-tracing the same steps. The Amarillo Public Library also offers free access to Ancestry.com and HeritageQuest on their public computers. These subscription databases sometimes catch obituaries that the Globe-News archive missed or that ran in smaller community papers. Using both the library databases and the newspaper archive together catches more records than either one alone. Budget about two hours per research session if you are pulling records from multiple sources.
Get the Full Details
If you are looking for something more structured, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission maintains a finding aid for Texas newspapers that have been digitized. It is not limited to Amarillo, but it will tell you which publications have been scanned and to what year. That saves you from guessing which local paper might have what you need.
