Why You Should Look Past the Modern Paywalls
The Deseret News sits in a weird position for genealogists. It serves a very specific region — Utah and the surrounding valley communities — which means the coverage is dense but geographically narrow. If your family lived in Salt Lake County or Ogden between roughly 1900 and the early 2000s, you are in luck. If they lived in Provo and married into a non-LDS family, the coverage gets thinner around the 1970s era. I spent three years mapping out how different decades handled obituary length and detail before I stopped guessing and started building a real workflow. The main issue most people hit is that the Deseret News digital archive sits behind a paywall on NewsBank and Archive.org, but the physical microfilm at family history libraries is free. I used to drive from Colorado Springs to the Salt Lake City Family History Library once a month just to pull reels. The drive takes about four hours round trip and the microfilm reader jams if you're not careful. Now I have a contact at the library who runs scans for me when I can't make the trip. It costs about $25 per hour of research time billed out, which is still cheaper than the NewsBank subscription at roughly $30 a month with no guarantee of finding what you need.
Uncovering The Hidden Gems Of Deseret News Newspaper Obituaries A Treasure Trove Of Family History And Community Insight
What makes these obituaries different from the standard newspaper format is the cultural context baked into them. LDS obituaries follow a template that includes stake affiliation, temple ordinances completed, and sometimes even a brief scripture reference. A non-LDS obituary in the same paper might mention the veteran's service branch without any religious framework. Learning to read between those lines saves you from wasting time on assumptions. I once spent six weeks trying to confirm a marriage date because I assumed the obituary referenced the wedding ceremony when it was actually describing a blessing or dedication service. The actual marriage license was filed two months later in the county records. Finding that took me crossing referencing the obituary text against the Utah Division of Consumer Protection marriage database, which indexes records back to 1904. The obituary format changed noticeably after 1985. Before that, they were often two to four paragraphs with minimal biographical detail. After 1985, the length increased to one or two full columns, which is when you start getting school names, employer histories, and even the names of surviving siblings that aren't listed in census records. This shift isn't documented anywhere in the newspaper's editorial guidelines. It came from a combination of advertising revenue from funeral homes wanting more premium space and a cultural shift toward longer memorial content. Knowing this helps you calibrate your search expectations by decade rather than treating all eras the same.
Where to Actually Find the Records
The Church History Library in Salt Lake City holds the complete microfilm run from 1850 onward. They don't charge for microfilm use, but you need a reader-printer pass which requires a valid library card and a $5 deposit that you get back when you return the equipment. The reading room is small and seats about twelve people. If you go during summer or around Thanksgiving week, you will likely wait in line for a machine. I learned to go on a Tuesday morning around 8:30 AM when the room opens and the crowd hasn't built up yet. The machines print at 200 DPI which is fine for basic reading but terrible if you need to use the images for publication or legal documentation. For that you need to request a formal scan through their digitization department, which takes about three weeks and costs $2 per page. The Utah State Archives in Salt Lake City also holds Deseret News issues on microfilm, but their collection has gaps. The 1918 influenza pandemic years are incomplete because many issues were stored in off-site facilities that flooded in the 1990s before being restored. If you are researching ancestors who died between January and August 1919, check the archives catalog first to see if the specific month exists before you commit time to it. I wasted an entire afternoon pulling a reel that turned out to be a duplicate of another month. The catalog entry didn't flag the gap because the finding aid was last updated in 2003. For digital access, theDeseret News archive through NewsBank runs from 1996 forward with full text search. Before 1996, you are mostly stuck with image-only versions that require manual page browsing. The OCR quality for pre-1996 issues is roughly 60 to 70 percent accurate depending on the print quality of the original. Misread characters show up frequently in names like turning a 't' into an 'f' or dropping a middle initial entirely. I built a workaround by using the Ancestry.com Utah, U.S., Church History Library Birth, Marriage, and Death Records collection as a cross-reference. When a name comes back with a suspicious misspelling in the newspaper archive, I search the church records first to get the correct spelling, then run that corrected version back through the newspaper search. This usually cuts false-negative rates from about 40 percent down to under 10 percent.
Get the Full Details
What the Obituaries Actually Tell You Beyond the Basics
A standard obituary lists the deceased, date of death, surviving family members, and funeral arrangements. The hidden value is in the details that get glossed over. The survivor list often includes nieces and nephews, cousins, and in-laws that don't appear in vital records. A single obituary can connect three separate family lines in one document. I found a second great aunt who had been completely missing from my tree because her obituary mentioned her surviving sister who lived in Idaho, and that sister's name led me to a census record that I had never found through standard searches. The employment and organizational affiliations listed in obituaries are gold mines for understanding socioeconomic status. A mention of "member of the United Mine Workers Local 450" tells you more than a simple job title. It gives you a union number, a location, and a timeframe. I used one of these mentions to track down a labor union pension record that confirmed an ancestor's birth year was off by three years in the census data. The union record showed the correct date because it was tied to a Social Security application from 1937. Military service mentions are common but often incomplete. The Deseret News didn't consistently include rank, unit, or war service until World War II. Before that, obituaries might just say "served his country" without specifics. If your ancestor served in the Civil War or Spanish-American War, the obituary reference is usually vague, and you need to pull the pension file from the National Archives. The pension file will contain the enlistment record, discharge papers, and sometimes even a medical evaluation that reveals causes of death not mentioned in the newspaper.
Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
The biggest mistake I see is assuming the date on the obituary is the date of death. Funeral homes often submit obituaries a few days before the actual service, and the newspaper prints them before the death occurs. The date of publication is not the date of death. I once built a timeline that placed a death three weeks after the obituary because I trusted the printed date. The actual death certificate filed with the state showed the person died two days before the paper went to press. Always cross-reference with the Utah Death Certificate collection, which is available through the Department of Health and is free to search online. Another trap is relying on the obituary for exact dates without verification. Many obituaries list birth years but not full birth dates. Some list approximate ages at death, which can throw off your calculations if the person hadn't had their birthday yet in the year they died. I had an ancestor listed as 72 in an obituary who was actually 71, turning 72 two months after her death. This mattered because I was trying to match her to a Social Security number, and the age discrepancy was enough to make the SSN application record appear incompatible. Geographic assumptions are another frequent error. The Deseret News covers the Wasatch Front primarily. If your family lived in rural southern Utah or the Uintah Basin, they might not have been covered at all, or the coverage might have come from a regional edition that ran in a different section. I learned this the hard way when I spent weeks searching the main Deseret News archive for an ancestor who actually had his obituary published in the Salt Lake Tribune because his family had ties to the eastern part of the state. Checking the Utah newspapers catalog at the State Archives before you commit to a single source would have saved me about ten hours of fruitless searching.
When the Deseret News Won't Help You
The collection is strongest for Utah County and Salt Lake County. Rural areas outside the major valleys have sparse coverage, especially before 1940. If your ancestor died in a small town like Fillmore or San Juan County, you are better off looking at the local papers or the Utah Historical Quarterly for notices. The Deseret News sometimes reprinted obituaries from other papers, but those reprints are rare and usually only for notable figures or people with wider family networks. Pre-1850 obituaries are virtually nonexistent in the Deseret News because the paper didn't exist until 1850. If you are researching earlier periods, you need to look at the Millennial Star, which was the LDS Church's international newspaper published in England, or the Times and Seasons published in Nauvoo. These contain death notices but in a very different format that is harder to search because they are handwritten or typeset in a font that OCR handles poorly. Post-2010 obituaries in the Deseret News have shifted toward much shorter formats. Many families now choose to publish memorials through funeral home websites or social media rather than paying for newspaper space. The cost per line in 2024 runs approximately $18 per inch, which means a standard two-column obituary can cost over $200. This economic pressure has reduced the amount of detail included in modern obituaries, making the older records more valuable for genealogical research than the recent ones.
A Practical Search Workflow
Start with the death certificate from the Utah Department of Health if the death occurred after 1904. This gives you the exact date, place, and informant's name. The informant is usually a family member who would have supplied information to the newspaper. Use that informant's name to trace who else in the family might have submitted the obituary. Then search the Deseret News archive using the deceased's full name and the death date as your primary filters. If the digital archive returns nothing, pull the microfilm for that specific month from the Family History Library. Check both the morning and evening editions if they exist for that period, because some obituaries ran in the evening supplementary section. When you find the obituary, extract every name mentioned, every organization listed, and every location referenced. Create a spreadsheet with columns for name, relationship, source, and notes. This spreadsheet becomes your reference point for follow-up research. Cross-reference each name against census records, marriage licenses, and other newspaper articles. I typically spend about two to three hours per obituary doing this kind of deep extraction. It seems slow, but it prevents the common problem of finding an obituary and then realizing two weeks later that you missed a crucial detail because you were reading too quickly the first time around. Finally, don't stop at the obituary itself. The "in loving memory" and "survived by" sections are where the extended family connections live. Those names are your next research path. Each one can lead to another obituary, another census record, or another document that fills a gap you didn't know existed. I've built entire branches of my family tree starting from a single sentence in a 1962 Deseret News obituary that mentioned a cousin I had never heard of. That cousin turned out to be the key to unlocking three generations of my maternal line that had been completely missing from my research.
