Reading El Paso Times Obituaries Like Someone Who Actually Knows What They're Doing
Most people approach local newspaper obituaries like they're looking for exact dates, and that's usually fine until it isn't. The El Paso Times has been publishing obituaries since the early 1900s, and the collection there is genuinely useful if you know how to navigate it. This isn't a glamorous database. It doesn't have faceted search filters or clean metadata. What it has is raw records of who lived and died in a border city that grew from nothing into something substantial over roughly a century. The process starts at newspaperarchive.com or the El Paso Public Library's own digital access points. Both work, but they surface different things. The newspaper archive pulls the actual scanned pages, which means you see context. The library portal sometimes indexes differently because the library staff actually cataloged certain sections by hand in the mid-2000s. You'll want to use both. Search strategy matters more than most beginners realize. When I started digging into my own family line, I kept searching by the full name and got nothing for about two hours. What I didn't understand was that some El Paso Times obituaries from the 1940s through the 1960s were published under just the first initial and last name, especially for non-Caucasian residents. I found my great-aunt's death notice that way. She was listed as "Maria L. Gonzalez" in one version and "M.L. Gonzales" in another. Same person, different filing practices depending on which editor handled the section that week.
The chronological browsing method is probably the most reliable approach. You pick a death year, go to the obituary section page, and scan. It sounds slow, but it catches entries that the full-text search misses entirely. Search algorithms in these databases have historically struggled with OCR errors on aged print. Names get misread as other names. Dates shift by a year or two. Browsing the actual page layout sidesteps all of that. Here's something nobody tells you about these obituaries: they often list surviving relatives with addresses. That means a single obituary can branch your entire search forward and backward simultaneously. The children listed might have their own marriage records or military service documents filed in El Paso county. The address given for a surviving parent might match a property deed in the same neighborhood. These connections aren't always obvious on first read, and that's where the work happens. Another detail worth noting is that the El Paso Times obituary format changed significantly around 1978. Before that, they were typically brief notices, sometimes just a paragraph or two with the basic facts. After that point, they expanded considerably, often including biographical sketches, church affiliations, union memberships, and even the specific school someone graduated from. If you're researching someone who died before 1978, don't expect rich detail. Instead, treat the death notice as a starting coordinate rather than a complete picture. Cross-reference with the El Paso County Courthouse records and the Diocese of El Paso archives for baptismal or marital documentation that fills in the gaps.
I hit a wall recently trying to track down a World War II veteran from El Paso whose obituary mentioned he served in the Pacific Theater but gave no unit or rank. The Times obituary itself was only three paragraphs. I ended up finding the answer by looking at his wife's obituary published twelve years later, which listed him as "veteran of the 11th Airborne Division." One document sitting silently in the archive for over a decade provided the missing piece. You have to let the collection speak to you across multiple entries rather than expecting any single obituary to contain everything. Access-wise, the El Paso Public Library offers free on-site computer access to their genealogy section, which includes the full digitized run of the El Paso Times going back to 1881. Their microfilm readers also work if you prefer the original physical pages. The library is located on the second floor of the Main Branch, and the staff there are genuinely helpful if you ask for their genealogy assistance hours, which they post on their website. I'd recommend calling ahead rather than just showing up, because the terminal count is limited during peak seasons when everyone is searching simultaneously. If you're doing this kind of research regularly, consider building your own spreadsheet tracking each obituary you find. Include the date of publication, the full name as printed, any addresses mentioned, names of surviving family, and a separate column for "linked records found." This keeps you from doubling back on the same person across different searches, which happens more often than you'd think, especially in a city where common surnames like Rodriguez, Garcia, and Smith appear frequently in the records.
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The limitations are real and worth acknowledging. There are gaps. Years like 1918 and 1919 have sparse coverage due to wartime paper shortages. Some sections were poorly preserved in the original newspaper runs and the scans show significant degradation. A handful of issues from the 1950s are partially missing from the digital archive, though the library retains physical copies on microfilm that you can access in person. If your target died during one of those gap periods, the workaround is to check adjacent weeks' papers for possible late filings, since some families submitted obituaries after the fact rather than immediately upon death. Another frustration is the indexing inconsistency. The Times didn't use a standardized obituary template for most of its history. Some entries include the person's age. Some don't. Some list the burial location. Most don't. The Social Security Death Index can confirm a death date, but it won't give you the biographical detail that a newspaper obituary provides. The two sources serve different purposes, and treating them as interchangeable will cost you time. For anyone serious about this kind of research, I'd suggest pairing the El Paso Times obituaries with the Texas Death Index maintained by the Texas Department of State Health Services. The state index provides the official death certificate numbers, which then allow you to request the actual certificate if needed. This combination gives you both the narrative detail from the newspaper and the formal data from the state record. Using just one source leaves holes in either direction.
The history of El Paso is embedded in these records more densely than most people realize. The city transformed rapidly through the Depression era, the WWII boom, and the postwar suburban expansion, and the obituary pages document that transformation through individual lives. You'll see immigration patterns in the names and origins listed. You'll see economic shifts in the job titles and union affiliations. You'll see public health trends in the causes of death. It's not always comfortable reading, but it's accurate reading, and that's what matters when you're building something real from incomplete sources.
