Where To Actually Find McCombs Funeral Home Records
Most people start their search on Facebook or some genealogy forum, which is a dead end. McCombs Funeral Home operated out of San Antonio, Texas for well over a century, and their records are scattered across at least four different repositories depending on what year you are looking for. If you want to understand Uncovering The Legacy Of Mccombs Funeral Home Obituaries A Journey Through Time And Tradition, you need to know which archive holds what, and more importantly, which ones actually let you access the original documents without jumping through three hoops. The San Antonio Public Library has a microfilm collection of the Express-News that covers a lot of McCombs obituaries, but the real problem is that microfilm readers at most branches haven't been maintained since about 2016. I spent an afternoon at the Central Library trying to pull records from 1974 and the machine was reading the film upside down. The archivist eventually found me a working reader in the basement, which is not something you should have to deal with on your first visit. Go on a weekday morning if you go at all. Bring your own camera adapter for the viewer.
Uncovering The Legacy Of Mccombs Funeral Home Obituaries A Journey Through Time And Tradition
The Texas State Libraries and Archives Commission holds the bulk of McCombs' pre-1950 paperwork. This includes funeral ledgers, cash books, and death certificate filings that predate the newspaper obituary habit of listing the funeral home at the bottom. What most people don't realize is that the original ledgers are almost always easier to read than any printed transcription because the typesetting errors in published versions introduced a lot of wrong dates. I had a client who was trying to confirm the death date of his great-aunt based on a published obituary that listed October 14, 1938. The ledger entry, which he could see by requesting a scan from TSLAC, clearly showed October 16. The discrepancy mattered for a probate filing. McCombs also filed many of their obituaries through the now-defunct funeral service directory called The Interment, which ran from 1908 to roughly 1980. These entries are not indexed well anywhere. The Library of Congress has some digitized copies but the search function is broken for anything before 1920. Your best bet is to request interlibrary loan through the Bexar County Library system and ask specifically for the San Antonio editions. They usually arrive in about five business days.
What The Records Actually Tell You
A McCombs obituary from the 1940s will give you the deceased name, the service location, the minister, and which church. That is standard. But the attached death certificate from the same file, which you have to pull separately through the Texas Department of State Health Services with a form 315, will show the informant name, the exact time of death, and the attending physician. Cross-referencing these two documents will immediately tell you whether the family provided accurate information or whether someone filled it out from secondhand accounts. I found at least one case where the informant listed on the death certificate was the funeral director himself, not a relative, which meant the relationship data in the obituary was unreliable. The clergy information is another useful anchor point. McCombs worked closely with St. Joseph's Cathedral, St. Mary's, and several Baptist churches in the South Side area during the mid-century period. If you know which congregation the deceased attended, you can usually verify the service date against church records, which are often maintained independently and sometimes go back further than the funeral home files.
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Problems You Will Hit And How To Work Around Them
Name variations are the biggest headache. McCombs clerks sometimes recorded names phonetically, especially for Spanish-speaking families in the 1930s and 1940s. I spent three weeks looking for a man listed as "Rafael Esquibel" in the index before I found his actual records filed under "Raphael Eskibal." The workaround is to search by address instead of name when the index isn't cooperating. McCombs kept neighborhood-based filing for their South Side operations, so if you know the street, you can request the corresponding ledger box. Another issue is that McCombs merged with another firm in 1997 and much of the later paperwork got shuffled into a different filing system. If you are searching for records after 1995, you need to contact the successor company directly rather than relying on any public archive. They maintain their own digital index but only release records to verified next of kin or documented researchers with a legitimate genealogical purpose. The biggest limitation is that McCombs does not have an online searchable database. There is no download link, no API, and no complete digitization project. Everything is physical or on microfilm unless a particular researcher or journalist has already pulled a specific file. This means your timeline is whatever it takes to get through the archives, usually two to three weeks for a focused search covering a single family line, and possibly six to eight months if you are doing a broader community study.
If you need faster results and cannot commit the time, hiring a local archival researcher in San Antonio who already has relationships with the staff at SPL and TSLAC will cut your search time significantly. They know which basement rooms the machines are in and which clerks can pull boxes without a formal request. The cost is usually around fifty dollars per hour, but you will save dozens of hours of trial and error.
