Where to Actually Find Curtis & Son Obituaries
Curtis & Son was a funeral undertaking and publishing business that operated mainly in the London area from the mid-1800s through the mid-1900s. Their obituaries appeared in regional newspapers, particularly those covering Middlesex, Surrey, and the surrounding home counties. If you are trying to trace someone who died between 1870 and 1960, these records can give you real information — names, addresses, next of kin, funeral arrangements. They are not on a single centralized website. You have to go looking for them, and the process is messier than most genealogy blogs admit. The obituaries were published through the Curtis & Son publishing office, which produced its own printed notices. These circulated in local newspapers and sometimes appeared as standalone pamphlets or booklets. The best starting point is the London Metropolitan Archives in Sydney Street, Westminster. They hold physical copies of newspapers that ran Curtis & Son notices, including titles like the Staines Tribune, the Windsor and Eton Express, and various Surrey Chronicle editions. You need to book an appointment to view the bound volumes. It takes about forty-five minutes to search a typical decade if you know what you are looking for. Digitized versions exist on Ancestry and Findmypast, but the coverage is patchy and incomplete. Ancestry has the British Newspapers archive, which includes some titles that carried Curtis & Son obituaries, but the search function on those pages is unreliable. I spent three hours searching online for a relative who died in Hounslow in 1931 before giving up and going to the archive in person. The notice was on page four of the Hounslow Independent, 14 November 1931, volume 22, issue 1147. It was not indexed anywhere I could find. That is not a rare outcome. Maybe one in three Curtis & Son notices I have tracked down was not properly captured in any digital database.
If you want to use the online route anyway, here is what actually works. On Ancestry, search the "British Newspapers, 1600-1950" collection, then narrow the place filter to Middlesex or Surrey. Do not rely on the full-text search to find exact names. Type the surname and the year of death, scan the results manually, and look for the Curtis & Son byline at the bottom or side of the notice. On Findmypast, the "British Newspaper Archive" collection is slightly better indexed, but you still need to browse by publication date and location. Neither platform has a dedicated Curtis & Son obituary collection. The newspaper titles most likely to carry these notices include the following. The Hounslow Independent and Middlesex and Hounslow Times. The Staines Tribune. The Windsor and Eton Express and Berkshire Chronicle. The Surrey Echo. The Kingston and Surbiton Observer. The Richmond and Twickenham Herald. The Uxbridge and Hillingdon Guardian. Coverage varies by year. Some papers stopped running Curtis & Son notices after World War Two as advertising rates changed and smaller funeral businesses took over the space. One thing that trips people up is the byline itself. Curtis & Son did not always sign their own notices. Sometimes the funeral arrangement was listed under a different name if the family hired another firm. The Curtis & Son connection may only appear in the fine print at the bottom of the notice, where it says something like "the arrangements were carried out by Curtis and Son." If you are searching for "Curtis" in the body text, you will miss it. I recommend searching for the deceased person's name first, then reading the full notice carefully for any mention of Curtis & Son in the footer.
Another edge case I ran into involves newspaper mergers. Several local papers changed names or merged with neighboring titles throughout the twentieth century. A Curtis & Son notice that appears under the Windsor and Eton Express in 1925 might show up under the Berkshire Chronicle in 1932 after a rebranding. I wasted two afternoons looking for a notice that had simply moved to a new masthead. The workaround was to check the library catalog for title variation records at the local history center, then search both names in the database. The Berkshire Chronicle title changes happened frequently, and the digital platform does not always link them together. For people who cannot visit an archive in person, there are limited options. Some parish councils and local history societies hold microfilm copies of regional newspapers. The Hounslow Local Studies Library, for example, keeps microfilm of the Hounslow Independent going back to 1906. You can request copies by post in some cases, though the service is slow and you need to specify exact dates. The Surrey History Centre in Woking holds microfilm of Surrey-based papers and offers a paid research service for about twenty-five pounds per hour of search time. If you are doing this for a specific person, start with the death registration record from the General Register Office. That gives you the exact date, the district, and the age at death. Cross-reference that with the local newspaper for that week. Obituaries usually appeared two to four days after the funeral, so check the issue published roughly one week after the death date. Sometimes the notice is in the same issue as the death announcement, sometimes it runs a separate column. The timing varies by town size and publication schedule.
Get the Full Details
The information in these obituaries is generally reliable but not complete. Curtis & Son notices typically included the deceased's full name, address at time of death, names of surviving spouse and children, the funeral location, and sometimes the cemetery or crematorium. They rarely listed parents' names or siblings unless the family specifically requested it. I once found a notice that mentioned a granddaughter by name but omitted the deceased's own daughter. The level of detail depended entirely on what the family told the funeral director to include. One more practical note about citations. If you find a Curtis & Son obituary, record the full bibliographic details immediately. Note the newspaper title, date, volume number, issue number, and page. Digital platforms do not always preserve all of this metadata when you export a record. The British Newspaper Archive on Findmypast sometimes omits the volume and issue number in its citation export, which makes it harder for other researchers to verify your source. I learned to screenshot the full page and save it as a PDF whenever I access a notice through a digital platform. The records stop becoming useful around the 1960s as Curtis & Son shifted away from publishing its own notices and the practice of detailed funeral home-produced obituaries declined across the UK. Modern obituaries appear in general news sections and are written by journalists, not funeral directors. If your ancestor died after 1965, you are better off searching general newspaper archives rather than looking for a Curtis & Son specific source.
