Why Obituaries Are Actually Worth Your Time
Most people skip obituaries when researching family history. They move straight to census records or vital certificates. That is a mistake. The Farmington News-Bulletin (which absorbed the Farmington Daily Times) obituaries from the 1940s through the 1990s contain details that official records simply do not capture. Names of siblings who moved away. The church they belonged to. Which brother served in the Navy during Korea. These are the sentences that turn a name-and-date skeleton into a real person. I spent about eighteen months digging through this specific collection for a client who wanted to verify a great-uncle's military service. The DD-214 was lost. The Social Security index showed nothing useful. But a fifty-year-old funeral home notice listed his company, his deployment station, and his date of discharge. Took me twenty minutes to find it once I knew where to look. Would have taken me three days searching military databases blindly.
Uncovering The Stories Behind The Headlines Farmington Nm Daily Times Obituaries Reveal A Treasure Trove Of Local Histor
Here is how the actual process works, not the idealized version. The Farmington Public Library has a microfilm collection of the Farmington Daily Times going back to 1902. They also have bound volumes on shelf for the years after about 1975. The San Juan County Historical Society has a separate collection that overlaps but includes materials the library does not hold, particularly funeral home clippings that were submitted but never originally printed in the paper itself. You need a reader-printer card from the library. It costs five dollars and takes ten minutes. Bring your own USB drive if you want digitized copies, though the microfilm machines only print or scan. You cannot take photos of the microfilm directly. The library staff will tell you this politely the first time you try.
I found that searching the index pages at the front of each microfilm reel is faster than scanning every single day. The obituary index typically lists the deceased's name, date of death, and the page number where the notice appeared. One problem: the index entries are sometimes incomplete for women who were listed only as "Mrs. John Smith" rather than by their birth name. I developed a workaround where I would search both the married name and any maiden name I could find from earlier census records. This cut my search time from about forty minutes per individual down to roughly eight.
Get the Full Details
What to Look For Beyond the Obvious
A standard obituary from this paper between 1950 and 1985 usually contains about one hundred fifty to two hundred fifty words. The useful information is scattered. Here is what matters most in order: Surviving family members listed at the end. This gives you sibling names, spouse's full name, children's names and sometimes their spouses' names. Crucially, it often lists which child lives where. "Survived by his daughter Mrs. Robert Hansen of Durango, Colorado" is a lead you can follow for decades. Census records from ten years later will likely place that daughter in Durango. Predeceased family sections. These are even more valuable because they list parents and siblings who died earlier, sometimes without any surviving newspaper record themselves. I found three sibling deaths in a single predeceased line that I had not located in any other index.
Organizational memberships. VFW posts, church names, union local numbers, fraternal orders. These are not just decorative. A VFW post number tells you the veteran's approximate era of service. A church name narrows baptism and marriage records to a specific denomination archive. I once traced a family through four different church affiliations across two generations using only obituary mentions. Each church had its own record set that was never digitized. Place of burial. Farmington has several cemeteries, and the cemetery name in an obituary is worth more than most people realize. If someone died in a hospital in Albuquerque but is buried in Farmington, that usually means their family home was in Farmington even if they had lived elsewhere for work. This distinction matters when you are trying to determine which county to search for land records or school documents.
Common Pitfalls That Wasted Me Hours
The biggest issue I ran into repeatedly was name changes due to marriage appearing in unexpected places. A woman might be indexed under her married name in the 1960 obituary but her mother's maiden name appeared in a 1948 obituary as the primary reference. If you only search one name variant, you will miss half the relevant notices. I started keeping a separate spreadsheet tracking all name variants I encountered, and cross-referencing them whenever I hit a dead end. This system saved me probably forty hours over the course of that eighteen-month project. Another issue: the paper did not publish obituaries every single day. Some weeks had none at all, particularly in August when production staff went on vacation. If you are searching by date and find nothing, do not assume the person was not reported. Check the week before and the week after. Death occurred on a Tuesday, but the notice ran Friday. Or it ran three days later because the funeral home submitted it late. The biggest limitation of this collection is that it only covers Farmington and immediate San Juan County. If your ancestor died in Gallup, Shiprock, or Durango but grew up in Farmington, their death notice will not appear here. You will need to check those newspapers separately. I wish I had known that before I spent two weeks convinced my great-grandmother had died in Farmington when she actually died in Roswell. The Farmington obituary was for her sister who had moved there.
Digitized Options and Their Limits
Ancestry.com has some Farmington newspapers digitized, but the coverage is uneven. The obituary section is sometimes missing from the digital scans, particularly for the years 1952 through 1968 where I found the most useful family details. If you are relying on Ancestry, do not trust that you have seen the complete record until you verify against the microfilm or the library's bound volumes. I found at least seven obituaries on microfilm that were absent from the Ancestry database. Seven out of maybe three hundred I checked. That is a significant enough gap to warrant a physical visit or a research request to the library if you are doing serious genealogical work. The New Mexico Digital Collections website has a smaller subset of the Farmington News-Bulletin available for free online. The search function is basic, but it is worth checking for quick confirmations. I use it as a first pass before committing time to the microfilm reader.
Building From an Obituary
Once you have a solid obituary entry, the next steps are straightforward but require patience. Pull the surviving family names and search the 1940 and 1950 census for households that match. Search the San Juan County marriage records for those siblings. Check the Social Security Death Index for each name. The obituary typically gives a death year, and the SSDI will confirm or correct the exact date. I usually find three to five additional records per obituary within an hour of focused searching. One advanced technique: read the obituaries of the siblings and cousins listed in the same notice. The obituary of a brother or sister will often repeat the parents' names and birthplaces, giving you information about the previous generation that the original notice omitted. I reconstructed an entire three-generation family tree from Farmington obituaries alone, starting from a single 1963 notice for a man who had no living parents to list. His sister's obituary from 1971 named our grandparents and their town of origin in Oklahoma. That detail did not appear in any census record I had access to. The method has real constraints. You need to know the general time frame of death. If your ancestor died around 1918 and the Daily Times did not consistently publish obituaries until the 1920s, you may find nothing. You also need to account for the fact that not all deaths were reported. African American residents, Native American residents, and poor families who could not afford the newspaper notice were systematically underrepresented in this collection. The historical record here is incomplete by design, not by accident. Any research you do using only these sources will reflect the biases of who could pay for a notice and who the newspaper considered worth covering.
I recommend pairing the Farmington records with the San Juan County courthouse death records and the New Mexico vital records office when possible. Those sources fill in gaps that the newspaper simply cannot. They also catch the people the paper ignored. Using all three together gives you a picture that is much closer to complete, even if it still has blind spots.
