Everett Herald Obituaries And Why People Actually Care
Snohomish County has been publishing death notices since the late 1800s, and the Everett Herald has been the primary record-keeper for most of that time. If you have ever tried to trace a family line through this area, you already know the paper trail is uneven. Some decades are thick with detail. Others are frustratingly sparse. I spent about three years digging through these archives for my own grandmother's side of the family, and the process was rarely straightforward. The hardest part isn't finding the obituaries. It's knowing which collections are digitized and which ones require an actual physical visit. The Everett Herald archives are partially available through the Snohomish County Library system, but only going back to roughly 1996 in full digital form. Before that, you are looking at microfilm or scanned images that may or may not be indexed properly. I ran into a specific problem last year when trying to locate the obituary for my great-uncle, who died in 1978. The library's online catalog listed it as available, but the microfilm reel I requested had a gap around mid-January of that year. Turns out, the microfilm was damaged during a water leak at the storage facility back in 2003, and some reels were never recovered. The workaround was contacting the Everett Herald records department directly. They kept a separate index file for that period, and within two weeks they sent me a high-resolution scan of the page. Not free, not instant, but workable. Budget about 48 hours and a small fee if you hit similar gaps.
Another thing nobody tells you upfront: many obituaries from the 1950s through the early 1980s were submitted by funeral homes in condensed form. The Herald often published a one-paragraph notice instead of the full layout families paid for. If your ancestor's notice is unusually brief compared to others from the same year, it was likely the shorter version. The full text may exist only in the funeral home's private files, and those are not always accessible without a direct request and sometimes a legal kinship proof. The Snohomish County genealogical society maintains a volunteer-run transcript project for pre-1970 Herald obituaries. It is incomplete, but it covers certain neighborhoods and demographic groups more thoroughly than the official archive. I found three surnames there that did not appear in any searchable database. The transcription quality varies. Some entries have OCR errors that turn "Snohomish" into "Sno" followed by random characters. You have to read the surrounding context to catch these mistakes. A slow scan with patience matters more than any automated tool. If you are working with more recent records from 2000 onward, the electronic version of the Herald is much more reliable. The Seattle Times also runs cross-posted obituaries for Snohomish County residents, and those indexes can fill gaps when the Herald's own database drops certain pages. I have seen entire weeks go missing from the Herald's online archive due to a website migration error in 2014. The Seattle Times mirror caught those cases.
The biggest limitation of relying solely on the Everett Herald is that it reflects the population that could afford to publish. Certain immigrant communities, low-income families, and people who died in state facilities sometimes received minimal or no newspaper coverage. For those cases, the Washington State Department of Health death index and the crematory records from local providers become necessary supplements. They are not glamorous, but they contain names the newspapers simply did not print.
Get the Full Details
Where To Start If You Are New To This
Begin with the Snohomish County Library system's local history database. It is free with a library card and has the cleanest interface for browsing the digitized range. Take screenshots of everything. The website occasionally refreshes and loses session data on large PDF bundles. For anything before 1996, plan a trip to the Everett branch if you live nearby, or request a research appointment through their archives department. They allow photo uploads of the microfilm pages for a per-page fee. The staff are helpful but slow. Expect a turnaround of one to two weeks for requests. Join the Snohomish County Genealogical Society mailing list. They post when new microfilm reels get processed or when volunteers complete transcript batches. These updates are scattered across Facebook groups and a basic website, so nothing is centralized.
I have also found success using InterLibrary Loan to request specific microfilm reels from the Utah Genealogical Association or the FamilySearch library in Salt Lake City. This takes three to four weeks, but it is free and gives you access to copies the local library may have checked out elsewhere. It works best when you know the exact date range you need rather than asking for a broad span. The Herald's own historical archive desk can be reached by email with a formal research request. They will tell you what is available and what requires a physical visit. Their response time is usually within five business days. Do not expect immediate answers. The people working there are managing their regular jobs alongside archive duties.
