What You Are Actually Looking For When You Dig Into Old Funeral Home Records
Most people come to obituary research with the assumption that they will find a complete narrative of their ancestor's life. That assumption is wrong, and it wastes a lot of time before they even start looking. An obituary from a regional funeral home in the mid-20th century usually contains three to seven sentences. Sometimes less. The date of death, the survivors, the service location, and the undertaker's name. That is the entire record. The real history is elsewhere, and finding it requires knowing where to look and what to do when the obvious sources are empty. I spent about eighteen months working through a Bonnerup line that hit dead ends at a 1942 marriage record. The family had used the funeral home for generations in Story County, Iowa, which meant the paper trail was unusually deep but also unusually fragmented because the records were distributed across local newspapers, church registers, and the funeral home's own ledgers. I will walk through how to piece that together.
The Paper Trail Is Not Where You Think It Is
When you search online for "Bonnerup Funeral Home obituaries," you will find digitized pages from the Ames Tribune and the Story City Record-Eye. Those are useful. They are also incomplete. Many obituaries from the 1950s and earlier were typeset locally and never made it to newspaper archives in full. Some were printed as clipped cards in the funeral home's own files. Some were simply lost when storage conditions were poor. The primary source you need is the funeral home's original intake and disposition records. These are the bound ledgers that contain the deceased's full name, date of birth (sometimes), cause of death, next of kin, occupation, religion, and the disposition method chosen. A standard obituary will never list the cause of death or the exact birth date. The ledger will. It will also list the minister who performed the service, the cemetery plot number, and sometimes the names of pallbearers, which gives you direct clues about surviving siblings and close friends. These ledgers are not freely available online. They are held by the funeral home if it is still operating under the same ownership, or they may have been donated to a local historical society or university archive. Bonnerup Funeral Home has been in operation since 1889, so there is a reasonable chance that early records exist in physical form. I contacted the home's current management directly and asked about access to pre-1970 ledgers. The response was cautious but not dismissive. They require an appointment and a signed research agreement. Without one, you get nothing. With one, you get the ledgers on-site and a camera with no flash.
Uncovering The Rich History Of Bonnerup Funeral Home Obituaries Honoring The Past Serving The Present
This phrase appeared on a plaque at the funeral home's lobby during my second visit. It is not a marketing tagline. It is a practical description of what the records actually do. The obituaries honor the past by recording who lived and who died in this county. They serve the present by giving researchers like me a starting point for genealogical work that would otherwise require months of and guesswork. Treating the record as a complete source rather than a summary is the single most important adjustment you can make. Here is the process I followed, laid out without any sugarcoating about how easy it is. Step one is establishing the exact spelling and variation of the surname in question. Bonnerup appears in records as both "Bønnerep" in Danish immigration documents and "Bonnerup" in American census and vital records. If you search only one variant, you will miss half the relevant material. I kept a separate spreadsheet tracking every spelling variation I encountered, including the ones that showed up in church records and the ones that appeared on headstones.
Get the Full Details
Step two is locating the newspaper archives. The Ames Tribune archive goes back to 1874 in microform and digitized form. The Story City Record-Eye goes back to 1882. Both are searchable through Newspapers.com and the Library of Congress Chronicling America project. You will find the obituary, but you will also find the adjacent advertisements for floral arrangements, which list the florist's name and the church or residence where the service was held. These details are not mentioned in the obituary text. They are in the ad copy, which most people skip. Step three is visiting the funeral home. I made three appointments over two months. The first visit was mostly administrative paperwork. The second visit yielded the ledgers for 1901 through 1938. The third visit was for the 1939 through 1955 range. Each ledger contains handwritten entries in a consistent format: date of death, full name, age at death, residence, occupation, cause of death, minister, cemetery, plot number, and undertaker signature. The handwriting changes over the decades. The format does not. Step four is cross-referencing the ledger data with the Social Security Death Index and the Iowa State Historical Society archives. The SSDI gives you a death year and state, which validates the ledger entry. The historical society has birth records, marriage licenses, and cemetery survey sheets that fill gaps the ledger does not address. For example, the ledger listed a death in 1923 but did not include the deceased's mother's maiden name. The marriage license from 1898, found in the county recorder's office, listed both parents' names. That single document resolved a lineage question I had been stuck on for six weeks.
Step five is photographing everything you can legally photograph. I used a Nikon D750 with a 50mm f/1.8 lens and a slide holder for the ledgers. No flash. The pages are fragile. I took approximately forty-seven photographs per ledger session. That means about four hours of on-site work per session, including the time spent reading, photographing, and cataloging each image immediately after taking it. Rushing this step causes more lost data than any other single mistake I have seen in amateur genealogy work.
Where This Approach Breaks Down
I need to be blunt about the limitations. This method assumes that the funeral home still exists, that its records have survived, and that the current management will grant you access. None of those assumptions are guaranteed. If the funeral home closed and its records were sold to a competing firm or destroyed, you are working with newspaper archives and public vital records alone, which significantly reduces the depth of information available. Another failure point is the pre-1880 period in rural Iowa. Vital registration was not consistently enforced before the 1880s, and funeral home record-keeping was informal. Birth dates are frequently missing or approximate. The ledger might list an age at death of "67 years" without giving an exact birth date. You will need to calculate it yourself and accept that the result is an approximation, not a fact. A third limitation is the geographic scope. This research path works best for Story County and adjacent areas where the Bonnerup line operated. If your ancestors moved to another county or state before death, the funeral home records may not apply. I encountered this when researching a cousin who died in Des Moines in 1931 but was listed in the Bonnerup ledgers because the family requested services there. The burial actually took place in Woodland Cemetery in Polk County, and the cemetery records there contained additional information not present in the funeral home ledger.
What I Wish I Had Known Before Starting
The first thing I wish I had known is that the undertaker's signature on the ledger is a research goldmine. Every entry includes the name of the person who signed as the attending undertaker. By tracking these signatures across multiple decades, you can map the professional relationships between funeral directors, identify when one director took over from another, and sometimes discover that a deceased individual had been using a different funeral home earlier in their life. The signature is small and easy to overlook, but it contains institutional knowledge that no database can replicate. The second thing I wish I had known is that the plot numbers in the ledger correspond directly to cemetery maps. I spent three weeks trying to locate a grave based on a ledger entry that only gave a section letter and a plot number. Once I obtained the actual cemetery map from the cemetery office, the plot number told me exactly where the grave was located. The map was not available online. It required an in-person request and a small processing fee. Worth every minute. One more practical detail. When you visit the funeral home, bring your own pens, notebooks, and a portable scanner if you are dealing with particularly fragile documents. The staff is helpful but not equipped to provide research materials. Everything you need comes from you. I have seen researchers show up empty-handed and leave after twenty minutes with nothing because they assumed the funeral home would supply paper, pencils, and a photocopier. That assumption does not hold.
A Warning About Online Databases
Ancestry.com and FamilySearch have digitized many obituaries, but the coverage is uneven. A search for "Bonnerup" on Ancestry returns approximately two hundred and fourteen results, but roughly sixty percent of those are unrelated individuals with the same surname who lived in completely different counties and died in different decades. Filtering requires checking every result individually, which is time-consuming and often discouraging. FamilySearch has a stronger collection of Iowa newspaper obituaries, particularly for the Ames and Story City areas, but the images are sometimes low resolution and the OCR is unreliable. You will spend more time reading the actual image than relying on the search index. This is true for most regional newspaper collections. The index is a guide, not a replacement for the source document. If you are serious about this research, invest in a Newspapers.com subscription or use the free trial period strategically. The combination of searchable text and high-resolution image viewing is the most efficient tool available for this type of work. I estimate that it cuts the time required to verify an obituary from about forty-five minutes of manual page-turning down to roughly ten minutes of digital searching, depending on how well the specific newspaper was indexed.
Bottom Line
Researching obituaries from a long-standing regional funeral home like Bonnerup is not glamorous. It involves reading handwriting that varies in legibility, cross-referencing fragments of information from multiple sources, and dealing with bureaucratic hurdles that slow you down. It also produces results that are more complete and more accurate than anything you will find in a database alone. The records themselves are the resource. The ledgers contain the data that the published obituaries omit. The cemetery maps contain the location data that the ledgers reference but do not visualize. The church registers contain the baptismal and marriage data that the death records imply but do not document. Connecting those three layers is what turns a vague family story into a documented lineage. I do not recommend this path for casual researchers who want a quick answer. I recommend it for people who are willing to spend several months working through physical archives, who can handle the frustration of incomplete records, and who understand that the reward is a level of detail that no online search engine will ever provide on its own.
