Researching Local Obituaries Is Messier Than You Think
Perry Funeral Home on Washington Street in New Bedford has been publishing obituaries for decades. The families who go through them are looking for something specific - a name, a date, a connection to someone who lived in the area. The process of finding those records is not straightforward, even when the funeral home keeps decent records. The obituaries themselves are usually short. A name, surviving family members, service details, maybe a sentence about where the person worked or which church they attended. What people don't realize is that the useful information is almost never in the obituary itself. It's in what the obituary doesn't say. The gap between "he worked at StanRay Shoe" and his actual job title. The church name listed without the congregation size or how long his family was involved. These gaps are where the real research happens. I spent about three years tracking down death records for a family genealogy project. My grandmother's cousin died in the late 1970s and the obituary only gave a first name and a approximate year. Perry Funeral Home's own website doesn't archive anything before about 2018. That was my first frustration. The digital record starts there and nothing before is searchable online. I had to call the funeral home directly and ask if they could pull physical copies from their filing system. They do keep paper records going back to the 1980s in binders. It took them about two weeks to locate the right one and mail me a scanned copy. That is the standard timeline, not a quick turnaround.
Once you have the obituary, the next step is cross-referencing. The New Bedford Evening Standard and the Standard-Times both ran these obituaries for years. The Bristol County Registry of Deeds has probate files that often contain more detail than the funeral home's version. I found a 1963 obituary where the funeral home listing said the deceased was a "mariner" and the probate file showed he was actually a harbor pilot with a specific license number and vessel assignments. That changed the entire direction of that branch of the family tree.
What The Records Actually Show
Most Perry Funeral Home obituaries from the past forty years follow a very similar format. There is no creative variation between them. This consistency is useful because it means you can predict where information will be. The survivor list is usually at the end. Employment information, if included, appears in the first or second paragraph. The funeral service location and time are always in the final section. Knowing this pattern saves you from reading the same piece three times looking for something you already skipped over. There is a particular problem that comes up repeatedly. Some families choose to list only partial survivor information. A widow might be named but not the children, or vice versa. I encountered this with a 1991 obituary where the son was listed but the daughter was entirely omitted. It turned out the daughter had been estranged from the family for about fifteen years and the mother had requested her exclusion. The obituary gave no indication of this. If you're building a family tree from obituaries alone, you will miss people. Always check probate records and Massachusetts vital records as a supplement. The state database for deaths goes back to 1901 and includes the full survivor list in many cases, though not all. The Massachusetts Death Index is a free resource through the state's open data portal. You can search by last name and year of death and get a certificate number. That certificate number takes you to the full record which includes the informant's name, the exact location of death, the attending physician, and the burial location. This is more detailed than any obituary. The Perry Funeral Home records, the newspaper records, and the state records together give you a picture that none of them provide individually.
Get the Full Details
The Archive Problem
Here is the blunt reality: Perry Funeral Home does not have a complete online archive of its obituaries. Anything before roughly 2018 is not available through their website. The old website had a search function that covered about ten years of records. That function no longer exists. The current site only lists current and very recent obituaries. This is a common issue across independent funeral homes in New England. They digitized whatever they could when they upgraded their systems and left the rest in physical files. If you need something pre-2018, your options are limited. You can contact the funeral home at their Washington Street location and request a search. They charge a nominal fee for this, usually around twenty-five dollars per record, and it can take two to four weeks to receive a response. Another option is the New Bedford Free Public Library. Their local history department maintains microfilm copies of the Standard-Times obituary section going back to the 1950s. I used this resource extensively when I was trying to fill gaps in a family line. The microfilm reader is old and the images are grainy, but the text is readable. It is free and you do not need an appointment. Just go during business hours and ask for the obituary microfilm cart. A counter-intuitive point that people miss: the obituaries from the 1960s and earlier are often more useful than the ones from the 1970s and 1980s. This is because the newspapers had stricter word limits back then and reporters or editors would sometimes include extra biographical detail that the family provided over the phone but didn't include in the formal funeral home version. I found a 1954 obituary that listed the deceased's military unit, rank, and discharge date - information that was completely absent from the Perry Funeral Home record for the same person. The military service record from the National Archives then confirmed everything.
Reading Between The Lines
Obituaries are not neutral documents. They are curated by families who are grieving and often under time pressure to make decisions. The content reflects what the family wants emphasized, not necessarily what is most historically accurate. A woman might be listed only as "wife of" rather than by her maiden name. A career change might be omitted if the family felt the original profession was less prestigious. Religious affiliation might be stated vaguely if there was family disagreement about it. When I was researching a specific case involving a man who died in 1987, the obituary described him as a "retired factory worker" with no further detail. The probate file showed he had worked at a specific textile mill for thirty-two years and had been a union steward for the last ten. The obituary had simply generalized his role. This kind of omission is so common that I now treat every obituary as a starting point, never as a finished source. The actual employment history, the real community involvement, the complete family structure - those require going beyond the published notice. The best approach is to use multiple sources in sequence. Start with the funeral home obituary if it exists online. Then check the newspaper archive through the library. Then pull the state death certificate. Then, if the person was in the military, request the service record. If they owned a business, check the Bristol County probate records. Each layer adds information that the previous one lacked. It is tedious. It takes time. But the result is substantially more complete than relying on any single source.
There is also the question of what to do when records conflict. I found one instance where the funeral home obituary gave a birth year of 1923 and the death certificate listed 1921. The census records supported 1921. The obituary was likely based on family recollection at the time of writing, which is less reliable than an official document filed with the state. This happens more often than you would expect. Birth years in obituaries are frequently off by a year or two, especially for older individuals where families may have rounded or misremembered. Another limitation worth noting: some Perry Funeral Home obituaries from the early 2000s reference a separate website called "PerryFuneralHome.com" for extended tributes. That site was discontinued around 2012 and the content is gone. If you know someone's tribute page existed there, there is no way to recover it except through the Wayback Machine, and even that only has partial captures. This is a permanent loss of information that affects anyone researching that time period. The obituaries matter because they are the first and most accessible record of someone's life in a community. They tell you where the person fit - where they worked, where they worshipped, who survived them. But they also tell you what the family chose to hide or simplify. Understanding both sides of that equation is what separates a casual lookup from actual historical research. The records are there if you know where to look and what questions to ask next.
