Searching McNerneys Mortuary Obituaries: What Actually Works
McNerneys operates funeral homes across Michigan, mainly in the Flint and central Michigan area. They've been around long enough that their online obituary system has some quirks you need to know about if you're trying to dig into old records. Most people just search the website and get frustrated. Here's how to do it right. The primary entry point is their website. McNerneys posts obituaries at mnerneys.com under an obituaries section. You can search by last name or keyword. The search function is basic. It will return results from the last couple of years reliably, but anything older than roughly five years tends to disappear from the main listing. The site doesn't have a deep archive search, which is the first problem you'll hit. I spent an afternoon last year trying to track down an obituary for someone who died in 2012. Searched the name. Nothing. Searched variations of the spelling. Nothing. The obituary was still on their site technically, but it had been pushed off the first several pages of results and the search algorithm didn't surface it properly. What worked was going to the "All Obituaries" listing page and manually scrolling through by month. I found it on the third page of results under October 2012. Takes about twenty minutes if you're lucky. Could take all day if the name is common or the spelling varies across records.
Here's the thing most people don't realize about McNerneys obituaries. They don't use a third-party obituary platform like Legacy or Echovita for their main listings. They run their own system. That means you won't find cross-referenced copies of their obits scattered across other sites the way you might with larger national funeral chains. If it was published at McNerneys, it lives at McNerneys. It may have been syndicated to the Flint Journal or other local papers, but that's about it. Syndication is inconsistent, so don't count on finding duplicates elsewhere. For obituaries from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s, your best bet is actually the local newspaper archives. The Flint Journal ran McNerneys obituaries for years. ProQuest's newspaper archive and the Detroit Free Press historical database both have them, but access requires a subscription or a library card. If you have access through a public library, go through there. Many libraries offer free remote access to ProQuest Historical Newspapers. That's where I found records that the McNerneys site had already dropped. One practical issue you'll run into is the formatting of older obituaries. McNerneys changed their website template maybe three or four times over the years. Obituaries posted before 2015 often have broken links, missing photos, or truncated text because the old format didn't carry over cleanly during migrations. I've seen several where the survivor list just cuts off mid-sentence. Don't assume the obituary is incomplete because the web version is. The paper version the family submitted originally likely has the full text.
If you're doing genealogy work, here's a technique that saves time. When you find an obituary, write down the exact URL and the date it was retrieved. McNerneys occasionally updates obituaries with additional information or corrections months after the initial posting. The URL itself won't change, but the content might. Having a snapshot date matters if you're citing this later or if you need to track what changed. Another thing nobody tells you about McNerneys' system. Their search doesn't handle middle initials well. If someone's obituary lists "Robert J. Smith," searching for "Robert Smith" might not always return it depending on how the record was indexed. Searching for "R Smith" sometimes works better. It's a minor database quirk but it costs people time they don't have when they're already dealing with a loss. For pre-1995 records, you're basically on your own if the family kept things out of the newspaper. McNerneys didn't digitize their paper files. You'd need to contact the location directly. They have offices in Flint, Grand Blanc, Davison, and a few other central Michigan towns. Call the specific location where the person died. The staff can sometimes pull physical files or tell you if an obituary was ever published. Don't expect a quick answer. They're not set up for archival research requests, and the people working there are handling current funeral arrangements. But it's worth a call if everything else fails.
Get the Full Details
The obituaries themselves vary in quality. Some are thorough, listing birth dates, education, military service, church affiliations, and a full survivor roster. Others are minimal. A few pages with basic dates and a paragraph. This depends entirely on what the family provided and what the funeral director typed up. There's no standard template. You'll see some that read like brief newspaper blurbs and others that are pages long. Neither format is more reliable than the other. Just takes different amounts of research to verify. If you're looking for something very specific, like a military service detail or an exact employment history, the obituary alone might not have it. In those cases, pairing the McNerneys record with the person's draft card, census record, or Social Security death index can fill gaps. McNerneys obituaries are a starting point, not a complete source. They're useful for connecting living family members to the right lineage and getting dates that match up with civil records.
