Accessing Historical Obituaries When Online Records Get Messy
Dev Vargas Funeral Home has been operating in the Espanola area for decades, and their memory book records are among the more useful local archival collections you can access. If you are trying to dig into family history or research who passed through that facility, you will run into a few real obstacles pretty quickly. The online material is incomplete, the physical files require a visit, and the naming conventions shift depending on which decade you are looking at. I spent about three weekends last year pulling records from the early to mid nineties for a genealogy project. What I found was that the digital archive on their website is basically a sampling, not a complete catalog. The actual memory books — bound volumes where they recorded full obituary text, service details, and sometimes even photos — sit in their office filing system. Getting at them requires a phone call first, a scheduled visit, and usually a small copy fee of around five dollars per page. The process works like this. You call the front desk and give them the full name of the deceased plus the approximate year. They will check their physical index, which is organized alphabetically by last name within each year. If the person you are looking for falls within the window they hold on premises — roughly 1980 to present — they will tell you whether it is retrievable. Some older records from before 1980 have been archived offsite through the Rio Arriba County historical society, and those take longer to pull.
When I went in person, I brought a notepad and a camera. They do not allow loose papers at the desk, and flash photography is discouraged but permitted for documentation purposes. The staff will pull the volume, find the entry, and let you read it. You can write down the information or photograph the page. They ask that you stay seated and keep the volume on the desk, never take it yourself. I learned that the hard way on my first visit when the manager had to gently redirect me because I instinctively reached for the book. One thing nobody tells you about these kinds of searches is how much the funeral home's internal naming changed over time. Between 1992 and 1996, they switched from a bound ledger system to individual manila folders with printed obituaries tucked inside. If you are looking for someone who died around that transition period, you might find nothing in the digital index and the physical bound books will not have them either because the entry happened during the paperwork gap. The workaround is to ask the staff to check their transitional file box, which is unindexed but stored separately. That box does not appear in any public description of their process. Another thing that trips people up is the Spanish-language entries. Dev Vargas has always served a mixed community, and obituaries from the seventies and eighties frequently appear in Spanish or as bilingual entries. The online search tool only indexes the English titles, so searching for a surname like Gutierrez or Trujillo will miss a substantial chunk of records. Going straight to the physical alphabet index by last name catches everything. I found two uncles that way who never showed up in any web search result.
If you want to try the online route first, which saves you a drive up the road, you can visit their current obituary page at the funeral home's website. It covers recent deaths going back maybe a year or two. Beyond that, the site essentially becomes a placeholder. There is no download link, no searchable database you can query, and no PDF archive available publicly. Any claim you see online about a full downloadable memory book from this funeral home is not accurate for the general public. The most efficient path is to call ahead, get the exact date range and spelling variations for the name you want, confirm whether the record falls in the on-site window, and then go in prepared to spend about twenty minutes at the desk. Bring ID, since they sometimes ask for it when you are accessing records that include next of kin contact information, which they will redact before showing you. The whole visit usually takes under thirty minutes if your person is in the current filing system. For records outside their retention window, the next best option is the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives in Santa Fe. They hold a subset of funeral home records from the northern part of the state, though coverage is spotty and depends on which years the particular facility chose to donate. It is worth a request if your person is pre 1980 and the on site search comes up empty. Processing time on those requests is roughly two to four weeks, and there is no fee for the search itself, only for copies.
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