Reading Shreveport Obituaries Without Losing Your Mind
Most people treat obituaries as a quick read before sharing them on social media. That misses the actual value. An obituary from 1952 in the Shreveport Times contains more genealogical data than most people realize, provided you know how to parse it correctly and where to find the versions that aren't sitting on the front page of Ancestry with a paywall behind them. Start with the public library system. The Caddo Parish Public Library has a microfilm collection of the Shreveport Times going back to 1912, and some early 1900s editions on fiche. They also have the Times Democrat archives separately, which matters because those two papers sometimes published different obituaries for the same person depending on where the family submitted the notice. I spent three weeks in 2019 trying to confirm a great-grandmother's death date using only online databases. Her actual obituary had been filed under "Boudreaux" on the microfilm, but every index I checked listed her as "Boyd." The workaround was stopping the index search entirely and running a daily scroll through the funeral notice section for the relevant date range, which took about forty minutes instead of three weeks. The Louisiana Department of Health maintains death records, but here is what most people don't understand about accessing them: deaths from the last fifty years are restricted to immediate family. That means if your research subject died in 1978 and you are a second cousin once removed, you are not getting the record from the state. You have to use the obituary route instead. The obituaries are public domain from the moment of publication regardless of their date, which makes them structurally more accessible than the official death certificates for mid-century records.
What to look for beyond the obvious details. Obituaries routinely list surviving siblings, their spouses, and sometimes even the names of deceased siblings. That single line about "survived by her brother Earl and sister Margaret" can crack open an entire branch of a family tree that would otherwise require three separate census cross-referencing sessions. I found a set of twin brothers in the 1940 census who I never would have connected without an obituary from 1987 that mentioned both of them by name while listing survivors. There is also the matter of maiden names, nicknames, and the deliberate ambiguity around dates. A lot of older Shreveport obituaries will list a birth year that doesn't match the census. This happens frequently enough that I track it systematically. The usual cause is either the family misremembering the year, or the person having been born in late December and the census enumerator rounding up. There is no hard rule. You always need to triangulate with at least two other documents before treating the obituary date as definitive.
Where The Records Actually Are
The Shreveport-Southeastern Louisiana Historical Society has a substantial microform collection you won't find digitized. Their reading room is in downtown Shreveport near Market Street. They also hold the funeral home records from several defunct local establishments, including some from Riddick Funeral Home and McNeel Funeral Home that predate the current corporate consolidations. These records sometimes contain the original death certificate copy the funeral home made, which includes the informant's name and relationship to the deceased. That informant name is gold for genealogists because it tells you exactly who was closest to the deceased at the time of death. The Louisiana Historical Association publishes an annual index that covers statewide obituaries, but the coverage for Caddo Parish obituaries is inconsistent before 1970. If you are working in the 1920 to 1955 range, the index is more of a suggestion than a reliable tool. You are better off pulling the actual newspaper issues and scanning the funeral notice section yourself. It takes longer upfront but saves you from wasting hours chasing citations that don't exist in the index. Online databases like Newspapers.com and GenealogyBank have significant Shreveport coverage now, but the OCR quality on microfilmed papers from the 1930s and earlier is uneven. Words get garbled. "Shreveport" can become "Shrevert" or "Screveport." Names with French spellings are especially unreliable. I recommend running searches with wildcards and alternate spellings, then manually verifying every hit against the original image rather than trusting the text extraction.
Get the Full Details
Common Mistakes That Waste Hours
The biggest one is assuming the obituary you find online is the complete version. Local papers often ran abbreviated notices for out-of-town deaths or for people whose families chose minimal coverage. The full notice might have appeared in a different paper entirely, or in the religious section of the same paper on a different day. I encountered this with a research subject whose family submitted a short notice to the Times but a much more detailed one to the Catholic diocesan paper. The detailed version included the names of all twelve children and their spouses, while the newspaper version only mentioned three. Another issue is the conflation of two people with similar names in the same family. Shreveport had a significant number of families naming sons after their fathers, which means you can easily merge two separate individuals into one record if you aren't careful about dates and addresses. Always verify the address listed in the obituary against the census record for that address in the relevant decade. If the addresses don't align, you are probably looking at two different people. Funeral home websites sometimes publish digital obituaries that are edited versions of the original newspaper notice. They may include additional life details that were never in the printed version, or they may omit information the family wanted to keep private from the public paper. Treat the digital version as supplementary, not authoritative, unless you can cross-reference it back to the original print publication.
The death date listed in an obituary is usually correct, but not always. Sometimes the family makes a typo. Sometimes the newspaper typesetter introduces an error. I found one case where the death year in the obituary was off by four years, which threw off every subsequent document search until I caught the discrepancy by comparing the burial record. The cemetery plot registration has its own date system that rarely matches the obituary exactly, and that mismatch is usually the first sign that something in the published notice needs verification.
What To Do When Records Don't Exist
Not every ancestor gets an obituary. People who died in hospitals without local ties, people who were unmarried and had no close family, and people who died during disease outbreaks often went without formal notices. The 1918 influenza pandemic left a gap in Shreveport records because many deaths occurred too quickly for families to arrange proper funeral notices. In those cases, you shift to hospital records, church burial registers, and city health department files. The Caddo Parish Clerk of Court holds probate records that can substitute for obituaries when no formal notice existed, though probate files lack the biographical richness of a properly written obituary. If you hit a wall where the person appears in census records but has no obituary and no probate file, consider whether they moved away before dying. Some Shreveport residents relocated to Houston or Dallas in their final years and were buried there. The local funeral homes kept forwarding addresses on file for notification purposes, and those forwarding addresses sometimes survive in the funeral home record boxes at the historical society even when no obituary was placed in the Shreveport paper. There is no shortcut that replaces actually reading the original documents. Indexes help you locate records faster, but the real information lives in the full text, and the full text is often only available on physical media or as unOCR'd images. Factor that into your time estimates. A thorough search for a single ancestor across all available sources usually takes between six and twelve hours for someone with moderate research experience, spread across multiple sessions. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
