Working With Russon Brothers Obituaries for Local History Research
I spent about three years digging into family histories in the Bountiful area, and obituaries from Russon Brothers Funeral Chapel turned out to be one of the more useful resources I found. Not everyone realizes how much detail actually sits in these records if you know where to look. The process isn't complicated, but it does require patience and a willingness to deal with inconsistent formatting across decades. Russon Brothers has been handling funeral services in Bountiful since the 1940s. Their obituary notices ran in local papers like the standard media outlets, and some were also posted on their own website over the years. What makes them useful for genealogy is that they tend to include surviving family members, birth dates, sometimes parents' names, and occasionally military service or occupation. You won't get everything in every notice, but the patterns are consistent enough to work with. The straightforward method is to start with the online archive if you're looking at post-2000 records. Russon Brothers maintains a searchable section on their site. You can filter by last name and date range. For anything before the digital era, you're dealing with microfilm at the Davis County Library in Layton or the Heritage Center in Bountiful itself. I spent a Saturday there going through rolls from 1960 to 1985. It took about four hours to scan through the relevant sections, but I pulled names and details for roughly forty family lines in that one visit.
One thing beginners miss is that the obituary text alone won't give you the full picture. The formatting changed depending on who wrote it and which newspaper carried it. Some versions included the full family tree while others were barely two paragraphs. Cross-referencing with the actual death certificates at the Utah Department of Health Vital Records office filled in most of the gaps. That process requires a direct client application and usually takes two to three weeks for mail-in requests. If you need it faster, you can go in person during business hours and get a copy the same day for a twenty-dollar fee per record. I ran into a specific problem last year that I hadn't expected. A family I was researching had multiple branches that all married into the same neighboring families, creating a tangled web of overlapping names in the obituary records. Three different Russon Brothers notices from the 1970s all referenced people with the same first and last names, and the dates were close enough that I couldn't tell them apart. The workaround was to pull the cemetery records from the Bountiful City Cemetery database and match burial locations. People interred in the same plot group almost always belong to the same immediate family. That single step cleared up the confusion in about twenty minutes. Another detail worth noting: Russon Brothers obituaries sometimes list the surviving spouse's maiden name rather than their married name. If you're tracking a female ancestor through her husband's obituary, you may need to look at her own notice or her parents' records to confirm her original surname. This tripped me up on at least six separate research sessions before I started expecting it.
For older records before 1950, the newspaper archives become the primary source. The Utah Digital Newspaper Project has some coverage, but it's incomplete for Davis County. Physical copies at the local libraries are more reliable for that period. The Bountiful Public Library has bound volumes going back to the late nineteenth century, though they only allow on-site viewing. Digitization requests through the library cost around five dollars per page and take about a week. If you're building a comprehensive family profile, I'd suggest starting with the most recent generation and working backward. Each obituary tends to mention parents and siblings, giving you the next layer of names to search for. This backward approach usually cuts the research time roughly in half compared to jumping into unknown centuries. It also means you can verify living relatives and cross-check dates while you go, reducing the chance of following a wrong lineage forward into deeper history. The main limitation of this approach is that not everyone who lived in Bountiful had their life documented in a Russon Brothers obituary. People who died in other counties, used different funeral homes, or had families that didn't place notices simply won't appear. I've seen cases where entire branches of a family were missed because a relative died in Salt Lake County and used a different provider. Combining these records with census data, voter registrations, and church records helps catch the gaps, but it does add significant time to the project.
Get the Full Details
The Russon Brothers site itself is at russonbrothers.com. They also maintain a Facebook page where recent notices appear within hours of publication. For historical research, that's not particularly useful, but it's worth monitoring if you're trying to track a specific living family for any reason. The funeral home office can also provide information about records they still hold in physical files, though they won't release anything beyond what's already public without proper authorization. Data compiled from these sources tends to be accurate for direct lineages. The information comes from family members who submit the obituary content, so errors do happen, usually involving incorrect birth years or misspelled middle names. Always verify dates against official documents when possible. A single conflicting source shouldn't necessarily derail a research path, but it should prompt you to dig a little deeper before accepting it as fact.
