Working With The Yakima Herald Obituary Archive
I spent about six months last year tracking down family connections through Yakima County records. A lot of that came down to the Yakima Herald obituary section. It is not as straightforward as it sounds, and a lot of people get stuck on the same obstacles. I will walk through what I learned the hard way. The Yakima Herald-Review has been publishing since 1890, so the archive runs deep. That is both the blessing and the problem. The older material lives in microfilm or in scanned form behind a paywall on their website. The free sections only go back a few years. If you are looking for someone who died before, say, 2005, you are going to need a plan. I started with the online archive. You can search by name on yakimaherald.com, but the search function is basic. It matches exact string hits, which means if the obituary lists a middle initial or a married name that differs from what you typed, you miss it. I learned this after two weeks of fruitless searching.
The workaround was to abandon the search box entirely and instead browse by date. I knew roughly when my relative died, so I pulled the microfilm for that three-month window from the Yakima Public Library. They have the microfilm readers on the second floor. You bring your library card, you get a timer, and you scan through. It takes longer but it catches everything. Names get cross-referenced in adjacent ads and notices you would never find through a keyword search. Another thing nobody tells you about these archives: the format changed over time. Before the late 1990s, obituaries were often short and factual. After that, they became longer personal tributes. This matters because the amount of genealogical information available shifts dramatically depending on the decade. A 1972 obituary might list a surviving spouse and three children. A 2002 one might list ten grandchildren, a battle companion, and the name of the funeral home. If you are doing serious research, pay attention to that transition period. It is easy to assume earlier records are sparse when really the style just changed.
Practical Research Workflow
Here is the sequence I ended up using. First, I confirmed the death date through the Washington State Department of Health records. Those are not public online but you can request them. Knowing the exact date eliminated guesswork. Second, I checked the Yakima County Clerk's probate records if the estate was filed. Obituaries sometimes mention probate, and probate files contain the full family tree in a way that obituaries usually do not. Third, I hit the microfilm. Fourth, I cross-referenced with Find a Grave and local cemetery records. The Yakima area has a lot of small family plots that never made it into digitized databases. One edge case I ran into was particularly frustrating. I was researching a woman who had been listed in the obituary under her maiden name, but she had married twice. The obituary used her current married name, which I did not know at the time. The microfilm search for her maiden name returned nothing useful. I spent three weeks chasing a dead end before I realized the funeral home listed on the obituary was a different one than the usual suspects. I called the funeral home directly. They kept archival records going back forty years. They gave me both married names and the maiden name. Two phone calls would have saved me three weeks. That is the kind of thing that does not appear in any guide. The obituary is a starting point, not a destination. Always follow the funeral home reference. Always check neighboring county papers too. People in Yakima County moved around. An ancestor who died in 1988 might have been living in Benton County the year before, and the Yakima paper would still run the obituary because that is where the family now was.
Get the Full Details
What The Archive Cannot Give You
I need to be clear about the limitations. The Yakima Herald obituary archive does not cover every death in the region. Rural deaths sometimes went through smaller papers like the Sunnyside Recorder or the Toppenish Enterprise. If your ancestor lived outside Yakima city limits, you may be searching the wrong publication entirely. I made that mistake early on. I found an obituary in the Yakima paper for someone who actually lived in Ellensburg and only happened to have family in Yakima at the time of death. The paywall on the modern digital archive is another real barrier. A subscription runs about forty dollars a month, and even with that you only get access to obituaries from roughly the last fifteen years. Anything older requires the physical archive or interlibrary loan. I used interlibrary loan through the Washington State Archives to get copies of microfilm rolls that the Yakima library did not circulate. It added about two weeks to my timeline but it was worth it. There is also the issue of incomplete records. Wars, floods, and staffing changes have created gaps. The Yakima area had significant flooding in 1996, and several months of newspaper records from that period are damaged or missing. If you are searching for someone who died between March and July of 1996, the normal archive path will not work. You need to contact the newspaper directly and ask about alternative holdings. They sometimes have backup copies stored elsewhere.
Tools And Resources
The Yakima Public Library remains the best free resource. They have a dedicated genealogy section on the second floor with the microfilm readers, a printed index of obituaries going back to the 1970s, and staff who know how to navigate the system. I recommend showing up on a weekday morning when it is less crowded. The microfilm machines are limited, and weekends they are often tied up by other researchers. The Washington State Archives in Olympia holds additional newspaper collections, including some Yakima Herald material that does not circulate to local libraries. You can request digital copies through their reference service. It costs about ten dollars per document and takes two to four weeks to process. Not fast, but comprehensive. For anyone doing this kind of research, I also suggest keeping a simple spreadsheet. I tracked death dates, obituary publication dates, funeral home names, cited relatives, and source location for every entry. Without that system, you will lose track of which names you have already checked and which ones are still open questions. I lost about a week to that particular oversight.
The Yakima Herald obituary section is a solid resource if you understand how it works and where it falls short. The key is to treat it as one piece of a larger puzzle rather than a standalone solution. Most of the people I have worked with on these kinds of projects end up relying on the obituaries for about thirty percent of their information. The rest comes from probate files, census records, cemetery data, and the occasional lucky phone call to a funeral home. That is the actual process. Nothing dramatic about it. Just methodical work over time.
