Searching Devargas Funeral Home Obituaries in Espanola
Devargas Funeral Home has operated in Espanola, New Mexico for decades. They handle a significant portion of the local death notifications for Rio Arriba County and the surrounding communities. If you are looking for obituaries from this establishment, the process is not especially difficult, but it does have a few quirks that trip people up. The funeral home maintains an online obituary section on their website. You can navigate to it through their main page, usually under a tab labeled "Obituaries" or "Services." From there you can search by name, date range, or browse recent listings. Most entries include a brief biographical sketch, service details, and sometimes a photo. The listings are generally posted within a day or two of the death being reported. Their phone number is publicly listed as (505) 756-2101. If you cannot find someone through the website, calling directly is often faster than waiting. The staff there are used to handling genealogy requests. They may not have everything digitized, so a phone call can surface information that simply does not appear online.
I spent a lot of time trying to track down an aunt who passed in the late 2010s, and the online listing was missing her middle name entirely. The entry only had her first and last name, which made it nearly impossible to confirm it was the right person among the common surnames in the area. I called the office, asked for the full obituary as originally written, and they pulled it from their filing system. It took about twenty minutes. They were not hostile about it either, just routine for them. Here is a counter-intuitive thing: newer online obituaries are sometimes less detailed than older print versions. As the funeral home shifted more toward digital postings, they cut back on the length and biographical depth of many entries. If you are researching a relative from before roughly 2015, check whether the obituary originally ran in the Santa Fe New Mexican or the Albuquerque Journal. Devargas submitted many of those, and the newspaper versions tend to include fuller life summaries, surviving family member lists, and even occupation details that the online version omits entirely. Another practical detail most people overlook is the date formatting. The website sometimes lists death dates in MM/DD/YYYY and sometimes in DD MMM YYYY depending on when the entry was added. If your search by date range is returning nothing, try switching the format or broaden your range by a week in each direction. I wasted an afternoon on this once because I was filtering by a narrow window and the date on the site did not match my spreadsheet format.
If you need documents rather than just reading a notice, request a copy of the obituary or the death certificate through the funeral home directly. They can provide copies for a fee, usually around fifteen to twenty-five dollars per document. The New Mexico Department of Vital Records also issues death certificates, but they require a direct familial relationship or legal interest, and the turnaround is longer. For basic obituary text, Devargas is the faster route. There are limitations you should know about. Not every person who died under Devargas care has an online obituary. Some families chose to forgo public notices entirely, or the records from earlier decades were never digitized. If your ancestor died before the 1990s, the online search will likely come up empty, and you will need to contact the funeral home to ask whether they hold paper files. Even then, retention policies mean some records may no longer be available after a certain period. The funeral home is located at 705 E Central Ave, Espanola, NM 87532. They are open during standard business hours, Monday through Saturday. For after-hours emergencies, they maintain a 24-hour line, though that line is for active arrangements, not record requests. Keep that distinction in mind so you do not waste anyone's time.
Get the Full Details
If you are doing serious genealogy work in northern New Mexico, I would also recommend cross-referencing with the Rio Arriba County Clerk's office for death registrations and the New Mexico Public Records Act requests. Those routes give you official documentation rather than just the published notice. The funeral home obituary is useful for the narrative details, but it is not a substitute for the vital record itself. I have found that the most reliable workflow is to start with the Devargas online listing, note any gaps, call the office to fill those gaps, then pull the newspaper archives if the online entry seems thin. That sequence usually gets you what you need in under an hour, assuming the person died within the digitized timeframe. Anything outside that window requires patience and a phone call.
