Finding Genealogy and Local History in a Small-Town Obituary Archive
The Las Cruces Sun News has been publishing obituaries since before most of the current database aggregators even existed. If you are trying to trace family in Doña Ana County or surrounding areas in southern New Mexico, going straight to their archive can save you weeks of searching elsewhere. The challenge is that the site is not built for researchers. It is built for readers. That means you have to work around their layout instead of the other way around. I started digging into these obituaries about five years ago while trying to confirm a great-aunt's marriage date. The family had two conflicting versions of the year. One side said 1952, the other insisted it was 1954. I searched Ancestry and FamilySearch first, which returned a death certificate and a social security record, but neither document listed the marriage. The obituary mentioned her husband by name and gave a year, but still no exact date. I ended up going through about six months of Sun News issues from 1952 to 1954 and found it in a June 1953 article about a local church event. The obituary itself was just a notice. The real information was buried in a related story a week later. That is how this process usually works.
Uncovering The Stories Behind The Headlines A Deep Dive Into Las Cruces Sun News Obituaries
Here is the practical workflow I use, not the ideal one you see on research blogs. Step one: get to the archive. The Las Cruces Sun News is owned by the Lee Enterprises group, which runs a national archive platform called the NewspaperArchive. You need a subscription, and the free trial only covers recent months. I pay for the annual plan, which runs about $199. For anyone doing regional research, it pays for itself after two or three hours of use compared to what you would spend on subscriptions to the big genealogy sites. Step two: search smart. Their search interface has a text box, a date range, and a location field. The text box is the only one that matters. Type the full name plus the word "died" or "passed." The site's OCR is inconsistent on older issues, so exact name matching does not always work. I usually search just the last name plus "obituary" and then scan the results manually. This takes longer but catches more hits than the automated filters.
Step three: read the surrounding content. An obituary in the Sun News typically runs 200 to 400 words. It lists surviving family, the funeral home, and the service location. But the things that actually help with genealogy are scattered across the paper. The death notices that run a day before the obituary sometimes include the name of the treating physician or the hospital. The funeral home ads list the exact time and place of the service. Religious organizations publish anniversary mentions in their own sections. I keep a spreadsheet with columns for the obituary date, names mentioned, cemetery, and cross-references to other articles on the same page. I ran into a specific problem last year that illustrates why the scanning approach matters. I was researching a man who died in 1978. The obituary listed his wife as "survived by his beloved wife Mary." The death certificate said his wife's name was Marion. I spent three days hitting dead ends because the indexed databases only used the name Mary. I finally went back to the microfilm at the Doña Ana County public library and pulled the original issue. The obituary clearly said Marion, but the OCR had misread it as Mary. The newspaper's own website index had locked in that error. Nothing I did in the digital search was going to fix it. This happens more often than you would expect with papers from the 1960s through the early 2000s, when they transitioned from typeset to digital formats. Step four: cross-reference with local sources. The Sun News obituary alone will rarely give you everything. Pair it with the New Mexico Death Index, which is available through the state's Department of Health website. You get a certificate number that you can use to request the actual death certificate. These cost about $17 per copy and take two to four weeks to arrive by mail. Combine that with the cemetery records from the local funeral homes, many of which have been digitized by volunteer groups. The El Prado Cemetery and the Las Cruces Memorial Park both have searchable burial databases online. A single obituary can usually be matched to a grave plot within an hour if you know where to look.
Get the Full Details
Step five: document what you find immediately. The NewspaperArchive link to any given obituary can change. Lee Enterprises reorganizes their site periodically, and old URLs break without notice. I screenshot every obituary I use and save it as a PDF with the access date noted. I also copy the text into a plain text file. This takes about thirty seconds per entry and prevents you from losing data when a link dies two years later. I have lost three solid leads this way, and each time it felt like a wasted week of work. There are real limitations to this approach. The Sun News archive on NewspaperArchive only goes back to 1997 in full digital form. Before that, you are dealing with microfilm or scattered PDFs that the library maintains. The earlier issues are mostly readable, but the OCR quality drops significantly for anything before 1985. You will miss entries entirely if you rely solely on the digital search. The library on North Main Street has the physical copies, and the staff is generally helpful, but they do not offer research assistance. You bring your own questions and your own equipment. They will let you use the microfilm reader, but you cannot borrow the reels. Another issue is that some families choose not to publish full obituaries. They run a brief death notice instead, which might contain nothing more than a name, a date, and a funeral home. These notices appear in the same section but carry far less information. If your ancestor's family was private, you may find only that they died, with no mention of parents, siblings, or birthplace. In those cases, the birth and census records become your primary source, and the obituary is just a confirmation marker rather than a research starting point.
If you are working outside of Doña Ana County, the Sun News obituaries become less useful. The paper covers Las Cruces and the surrounding valley. Neighboring communities like Deming, Mesilla, and Anthony sometimes have coverage, but it is sparse. For those areas, check the Deming Evening News archive or the Hidalgo County library records instead. The methodology stays the same, but the sources shift. What most people miss when they start with these obituaries is that the real value is in the connections between entries. A woman's obituary mentioning her brother who moved to Phoenix creates a lead. That brother's obituary twenty years later lists his wife's maiden name, which connects back to the original family line. I have traced three separate branches of my own family using this kind of lateral reading. It is slow. It requires patience and a willingness to spend time in places that are not optimized for your research. But it works when the standard databases fall short. The NewspaperArchive subscription is available at newspaperarchive.com. The Las Cruces Sun News section is included in the national plan. The public library at 500 N. Main St. in Las Cruces holds the pre-1997 issues and offers free microfilm access to the public during regular hours. No appointment is necessary, but they close at 5 p.m. and the microfilm readers are limited in number, so mornings on weekdays are your best bet if you plan to spend a few hours there.
I typically spend two to three hours per research session on this. A well-documented obituary with clear family references can yield three to five new leads in that time. A vague death notice with no family details yields nothing. The variance is large, and you have to accept that some searches go nowhere. That is just part of the process.
