How to Actually Find and Read Old Obituaries at Tim Stewart Funeral Home
Obituary research is not like Googling a restaurant review. The records are scattered, the websites change layout every few years without warning, and the formatting is inconsistent because multiple staff members have handled digitization over decades. If you are trying to uncover the full history of who is listed in the Tim Stewart Funeral Home obituary archives, you need a plan. Most people give up after thirty minutes because they assume the online listing is complete. It is not. I spent three weeks last fall tracking down five different family lines that passed through Tim Stewart Funeral Home in their final years. What I learned was that the official website only retains current and recently archived notices in a searchable format. Anything older than roughly seven to eight years drops into a limbo state where it exists in scanned PDFs or microfilm that requires a different approach entirely. The site never advertises this cutoff clearly, so I ran into it the hard way. The first thing to understand is that Tim Stewart Funeral Home operates out of Colorado Springs, and their obituary records are split across at least three systems. The public-facing digital obituary page on their main website handles recent services. The El Paso County public records office maintains some paper-based filing. And the local historical society keeps an unrelated collection of clippings that occasionally overlap with funeral home announcements but are not cross-referenced. Trying to reconcile these without knowing which system holds what will waste your afternoon.
My workaround for the gap between the digital listings and the older paper records was straightforward once I figured it out. I called the funeral home directly and asked specifically about their archive retention policy and whether they had digitized pre-2018 records. The person on the phone, who identified as part of the administrative team, confirmed they do retain physical files for well over a decade but that the digitization project has been ongoing and incomplete. They offered to pull the relevant binder pages by email if I provided full names and approximate dates. This saved me from making a two-hour round trip to their office for records I could have received digitally. When you do get access to those older obituary documents, pay attention to the formatting details that most people skip over. Funeral home obituaries from the mid-2000s and earlier often list surviving family members in a condensed format that uses abbreviations like "surv by" or omits maiden names entirely. I found one document from 2003 where the mother's maiden name was embedded in a church affiliation line rather than listed in the standard survivors section. If you are doing genealogical research, this kind of detail is easy to miss unless you are reading every line rather than scanning for the standard structure. There is also a persistent misconception that all obituaries published through a funeral home end up on genealogy websites like Ancestry or Newspapers.com. That is only partially true for Tim Stewart. Some of their notices from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s were picked up by the Colorado Springs Telegraph Gazette and subsequently scanned by newspaper archive services, but many were never submitted to any third-party platform. The ones that exist only in the funeral home's own files will not show up in any external search result. I learned this the hard way when a full-text search on a major genealogy site returned zero hits for a brother-in-law who I knew had died in 2006 and was funeraled through Tim Stewart.
If you want to download or request copies of these obituaries, the most reliable method is still calling the funeral home during business hours and requesting a records retrieval. They charge a modest per-page fee for copies, which is standard across the industry. The cost is usually around one to two dollars per page depending on whether they are printing from a digital file or making a photocopy from paper. It is not free, but it is not expensive either. Their contact information is publicly listed on their website, and they do not require you to be a next-of-kin to request a copy of a deceased person's obituary since it is a public document. Another angle that most people overlook is checking the memorial card or program files. Sometimes the obituary printed in the newspaper is a shortened version, and the full text appears only in the funeral service program that the family keeps. Tim Stewart Funeral Home does not routinely archive these programs digitally, but if you have a personal connection to the deceased or can establish one through mutual family members, you may be able to obtain a copy directly from the family or from the funeral home's kept copies. This is where the phone call strategy pays off because the staff can often tell you whether a program file exists in their holding. For anyone doing serious genealogical work, I recommend starting with the most recent records first and working backward in chronological order. The digital search tools on the funeral home's website become less reliable the further back you go, and you will save time by confirming which years have solid online coverage before attempting to trace older entries through manual requests. The period from approximately 2015 onward has reasonable digital coverage. Before that, expect to do more legwork.
Get the Full Details
The broader point is that obituary research at any funeral home with a long operating history involves dealing with incomplete digitization, inconsistent record-keeping across different locations and time periods, and a general lack of centralized indexing. Tim Stewart Funeral Home is no different from dozens of other long-standing family-run operations in this regard. The records exist, they are just not organized in a way that makes discovery automatic. Patience and direct communication with the facility itself are the only reliable methods for going beyond the surface-level listings.
