Idaho Press Obituaries: A Practical Guide
The Idaho Press has been a cornerstone of eastern Idaho for decades. Based in Idaho Falls, it covers Bingham County and the surrounding area. Obituaries in this paper aren't just formal announcements. They're genealogical documents, community records, and sometimes the only surviving written trace of a person's full life story. Most families place them because they want a permanent record, not because they understand how long that record will last or how hard it will be to find later. Newspaper publishing in Idaho goes back to the territorial period. The Boise Daily News started in 1863. The Idaho State Journal followed. Smaller papers spread across the state as settlements grew. The Idaho Press itself has operated under various ownership structures over the years, including periods under Lee Enterprises and local ownership before recent consolidation. These ownership changes matter for archives. When a paper changes hands, digitization practices change, and older issues sometimes sit in boxes for years before anyone decides what to preserve. Obituaries serve multiple functions that most people don't consider. They confirm dates. They list surviving family members, which is critical for genealogy research because those names lead to other records. They note military service, which points you toward pension files and service records. They mention church affiliation or organizational memberships, which open up entirely different archival sources. A well-written obituary can replace three separate research detours.
Here is how I approach pulling obituaries from the Idaho Press archives. I start with the Idaho State Historical Society's newspaper collection, which has microfilm and some digitized issues. Their digital archive at idahohistory.org is free. If the Idaho Press section you need isn't digitized there, I move to the local library in Idaho Falls. The Bingham County Public Library has microfilm readers and staff who know how to navigate the rolldown without tearing the film. That skill matters because microfilm scratches easily and the image degrades with each rewind. I also use newspaperarchive.com, which has a substantial Idaho collection. The indexing isn't perfect for the older material, but the full-image search is reliable. One thing I want to flag: the digitized version of pre-1990s Idaho Press obituaries has inconsistent OCR quality. Some columns scan cleanly. Others are faded from cheap newsprint and come out as gray blobs. When that happens, you go back to the microfilm original. The microfilm often shows text the digitized copy lost. I encountered a specific problem last year that illustrates why this layering matters. I was researching a family line from the Blackfoot area and needed an obituary from approximately 1978. The online database had the date range but the OCR text was completely garbled for that particular issue. I couldn't find the name through keyword search. So I pulled the microfilm at the Idaho Falls library, navigated to the exact date using the issue's column count and page number from the library's guide, and found the obituary on page six, column two. The physical paper had yellowed significantly, but the ink was still legible. The digitized version was unreadable. This happens more often than you would expect with Idaho regional papers from the seventies and early eighties. The workaround is straightforward: always verify digitized results against the microfilm if the content is important to your research.
Another practical note about accessing these records. The Idaho State Archives maintains the Idaho Death Index, which cross-references with newspaper death notices. It's not a perfect match because not every death receives an obituary, and not every obituary matches the index exactly. But the combination of both sources catches people who fall through the gaps of either system alone. I use this combined approach whenever I'm building a family file for someone who died before 1995. The gap between when digital obituaries became common and when they were routinely preserved online is roughly 1988 to 1998, and that window is where most researchers hit walls. For obituaries published after about 2000, the Idaho Press website has a searchable archive. It's not comprehensive for the earlier years, but the modern section is functional. I've found that filtering by last name and date range there is faster than digging through databases for recent deaths. The tradeoff is that the interface is basic and you cannot export results. You have to screenshot or manually transcribe what you need. Genealogists should also be aware that some Idaho Press obituaries were syndicated or republished in neighboring papers. The Pocatello Evening News and the Rexburg Standard-Journal sometimes carried obituaries from the Idaho Press region, especially for families with ties across county lines. If you cannot find a record in Idaho Falls, check the adjacent publications. It saved me two weeks of dead-end searching when researching a Teton County family in 2022.
Get the Full Details
The significance of these obituaries extends beyond individual research. Eastern Idaho has a history of agricultural communities, Mormon settlement, and railroad town development. The obituaries reflect that. They mention cooperative farming associations, Irrigation District meetings, and local church wards in ways that national databases don't capture. When I am working with clients on Idaho family history, I treat the Idaho Press obituaries as a primary source, not a secondary confirmation. The details inside them—the specific farm name, the neighbor mentioned as delivering supplies, the pastor who conducted the service—these are the details that anchor a family to a place and time. If you are just getting started, I recommend this order of operations. Search the Idaho State Archives database first for the death index entry. Then check the Idaho Press online archive for anything after 2000. Then consult newspaperarchive.com for the digitized range. Then go to the Idaho Falls library microfilm for anything before the digitized cutoff or any issue where the online version failed. This sequence usually cuts the research time to under an hour per obituary, compared to the two or three hours people spend jumping between sources randomly. One limitation worth noting upfront: the Idaho Press does not currently offer a free public API or bulk download of its archive. Every record requires individual searching. This is true for most regional newspapers. It means large-scale projects, like compiling every obituary from a ten-year span, take considerable time. If you need systematic coverage across many years, budget for that effort or consider working with a researcher who already has the workflow mapped out.
The Idaho Press obituary collection is not the only resource available. The Utah Digital Newspapers project includes some overlap for southern Idaho communities near the border. JSTOR has indexed select western American newspapers but the coverage is sparse for Idaho regional titles. FamilySearch has some microfilmed Idaho newspaper collections in its catalog, though the browsing interface is less intuitive than the historical society's platform. I have found that the single most useful habit is keeping a log of every search attempt, including the date you searched, the source you used, and whether the result was legible. I track this in a simple spreadsheet. After a few months, the pattern becomes obvious. You will notice which decades are well-preserved and which have gaps. You will learn which library staff members are most helpful with the microfilm equipment. These are the kinds of details that make the difference between a frustrated half-day search and a clean afternoon of results.
