How I Stopped Guessing and Started Actually Finding What I Needed in Cheyenne Archives
I spent three years trying to pull together a family history that included my grandmother's side, and theobituaries were the only thread I had. Cheyenne is small enough that you think this should be easy, but it turns out the records are scattered across three different institutions with no unified index. The Library of Congress has some federal land records. The Albany County Clerk keeps death certificates from 1908 onward. And Laramie County Public Library holds microfilm of local newspapers that never got digitized properly. Start with the Wyoming State Newspapers collection through the University of Wyoming American Heritage Center. They have the Casper Star-Tribune and the Sheridan Leader Tribune fully digitized, but Cheyenne papers are mixed. The Cheyenne Tribune-Herald ran continuously from 1886, but only the last forty years are searchable online. Anything before 1985 is on microfilm at the Laramie County Library downtown, and the staff there are not helpful with remote requests. You have to go in person or have someone local look it up for you. The death certificate index at the Albany County Clerk's office starts in 1908. Before that, you are mostly on your own unless the person died in a hospital, in which case the hospital records might still exist. I found out the hard way that the 1918 influenza epidemic created a massive gap in record keeping because the clerks literally fled the city. The death certificates from November 1918 through March 1919 are incomplete at best. There is no workaround for this. You will have to look at church burial records or cemetery transcriptions instead.
For actual obituary text, the Cheyenne Historical Society has a vertical file collection that nobody talks about. It consists of newspaper clippings arranged alphabetically by surname, not by date. The filing cabinets are in the basement and they do not have a card catalog. I spent two full days going through them in 2019 pulling together a list of births, marriages, and deaths for a single extended family. The filing system is alphabetical by the deceased person's last name, but sometimes people are filed under their wife's maiden name if they were widowed, and sometimes under their children's surnames if the family changed names. I learned this after accidentally searching the wrong section three times before realizing the system was more intuitive than logical. The cemetery angle is where most people give up too early. Oak Hill Cemetery has a recorded plot map from 1873, but the interment records are handwritten and many pages are illegible due to water damage from a roof leak in the late nineties. I spent an afternoon with a magnifying glass and a flashlight copying entries that were readable. The staff let me work there as long as I wanted. They do not offer transcription services anymore because funding got cut in 2021. If you need help and cannot go in person, there is a Facebook group called Cheyenne Genealogy Researchers where volunteers will flip through microfilm for you. I used them twice and they replied within forty-eight hours both times, which is fast for a volunteer group. Newspaper obituaries before 1940 are notoriously sparse. Most notices were just a two-sentence paragraph with the funeral home listed. The longer, more detailed obituaries that you see today became common after World War Two when funeral homes started writing them for families as part of their service packages. If you are researching an ancestor who died before 1940 and you want more than a name and a date, check the funeral home records. McLaughlin Funeral Home has been operating in Cheyenne since 1903 and they maintain a bound logbook of every service they handled. I requested access to their pre-1960 volumes and got a thirty-page packet with names, dates, and occasional notes about where the family was from. They do not let you photograph the books, but you can take handwritten notes. The process takes about two weeks for a response because they get a lot of requests and the person who handles them does it on their own time after their regular job.
If you are doing this digitally, the biggest time sink is verifying which Cheyenne you are looking at. There have been multiple towns named Cheyenne in Wyoming and the postal records sometimes mix them up with Cheyenne County in Colorado. I wasted about six hours in 2020 tracing a line that turned out to be a different state entirely. Always cross-reference with the Wyoming Digital Newspaper Collection before committing to a source. It is free and it will save you from following false leads. The Wyoming Vital Records office will not give you a death certificate unless you are a direct descendant or have a court order. I ran into this wall when I was trying to get my great aunt's records and the clerk told me straight that I needed to prove I was her grandchild or great grandchild. I ended up getting a copy of my grandmother's birth certificate and a certified copy of my own birth certificate and mailing them together with a notarized statement of relationship. It took eleven weeks to get the death certificate back. If you are impatient about this, the county clerk's office is faster for certificates after 1908 and they do not require the same level of proof for records over fifty years old. For the most recent obituaries, the Cheyenne Tribune-Herald website has a searchable archive going back to 2000. Before that, you need the microfilm. The digital archive costs twelve dollars per month if you subscribe directly, but the Laramie County Library gives you free access to their digital newspaper database with a library card. I walked in and got a card for five dollars and that unlocked everything. You can search by name, date range, and publication. It is not perfect. The OCR fails on older typeset fonts, so searching for "Johansson" will miss "Johnson" even when the original clearly says Johansson. I learned to search phonetically and scan the results manually instead of trusting the text extraction.
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The Wyoming State Archives in Cheyenne has some collections that overlap with what I just described, but they also hold territorial-era papers that nobody uses. The land bounty records from the Civil War era include some names of soldiers who settled in the Cheyenne area and their death notices are scattered through military pension files. These are not obituaries in any traditional sense, but they sometimes contain more biographical detail than anything you will find in a newspaper. The filing system is organized by regiment and then by name, which means you need to know which regiment your ancestor served in or you will waste a lot of time. I stumbled onto this by accident while looking for something else and found a pension file that listed my great-great grandfather's wife's maiden name, which I had been missing for two years. The archives are open Monday through Friday and they do not accept appointments for casual browsing. Just show up during business hours and ask for the territorial records room. The person who works there most mornings goes by Diane and she knows exactly where everything is, but she will not help you beyond pointing at the right cabinet unless you already know what you are looking for. One more thing that trips people up: the Cheyenne city directory. These were published annually from 1885 to 1990 and they list every resident by name and address. They are not obituaries, but they tell you where someone lived and who they lived with, which helps you figure out which obituary is the right one when multiple people share the same name. The Laramie County Library has the full run on microfilm and also in a scanned PDF collection that you can search. I used the city directory to verify that two different John Smith obituaries in 1923 were actually two different people by checking their listed occupations and street addresses. One was a blacksmith who lived on East 17th and the other was a railroad clerk who lived near the depot. Without the directory I would have merged two separate family lines into one. Finally, if you are doing this research for a book or a formal publication, every source needs to be cited properly and the archive staff will ask for that. I got asked once at the Historical Society for my citation format and I had no idea what they meant. I came back a week later with a typed list of everything I had used and they seemed satisfied. The key is consistency. Pick one format and stick with it. Chicago style works fine for this kind of local history work and it is the standard that most Wyoming historical organizations expect.
