Researching Broussard Obituaries: What Actually Works
Broussard is a small city in Lafayette Parish, Louisiana, population around 17,000. The obituaries published there cover a community that has shifted demographically over the decades, and working with them requires navigating several different record types depending on what time period you are researching. This is not particularly complicated, but there are enough moving pieces that people waste a lot of time before they figure out which archive actually holds what they need. Most people start by going to newspaper archives, usually the Acadiana Advocate or the Lafourche Times, or whatever microfilm the library still maintains from the 1980s onward. The problem is that the local newspapers did not consistently publish obituaries for every person who died in Broussard. A lot of residents of the area died at hospitals in Lafayette or New Iberia, and their families placed notices in those larger papers instead. I spent three weeks trying to find an obituary for a great-uncle who clearly died in the area, only to discover he was listed in the Lafourche Times because his funeral home operated out of Thibodaux. By then I had already sent two emails to the library asking if they had the right subscription. The Louisiana State Archives in Baton Rouge is where you should go for death certificates. They have them on file going back to the early twentieth century, though the digitization is spotty. You can request copies through their genealogy portal, and a standard search costs about ten dollars per certificate. The forms themselves are straightforward, but the handwriting on the older ones from the 1940s and earlier can be brutal. I learned to pull up the high-contrast version on the scanner before even trying to read a name. That alone saved me from misreading a surname that would have sent me down a completely wrong branch of my family tree.
Where the Records Actually Live
Don't overlook the diocesan records. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Lafayette keeps burial registers and funeral records that predate civil registration. If your ancestor was from a Catholic family in Broussard, which is a safe assumption given the Acadian heritage, those records are often more detailed than the newspaper notices. The parish records go back to the 1800s in some cases, and they include cause of death, next of kin, and sometimes even a brief biographical note that never made it into print. The Broussard City Clerk's office maintains some records too, mainly for recent deaths where municipal permits were filed. They do not publish them online, and you have to request them in person or by mail. Turnaround is roughly two weeks. I recommend going in person if you can, because the staff there are used to genealogy researchers and they know how to pull the right boxes without making you fill out a formal FOIA request.
Cemetery Records Are Underrated
St. Charles Borromeo Cemetery in Broussard holds a lot of the older interments, along with several smaller plots in nearby parish cemeteries. The plot cards on file with the cemetery association contain the exact dates, the names of surviving family members, and sometimes the name of the funeral home that handled arrangements. These are not indexed anywhere useful, so you have to physically go there or ask someone to look them up for you. The association is run by volunteers and they respond to emails, but response time varies. I waited six weeks once for a reply, then had to send a second email before anyone actually went to the filing cabinets. There is also the Broussard Historical and Cultural Center, which has a small but active genealogy room. They hold collections from the old funeral homes, including records from places like St. Charles Funeral Home and others that have closed or merged. These collections are not digitized and they are not on any database. If you are doing serious research in this area, a trip there is necessary at some point. I went there in 2022 and found a funeral home receipt from 1963 that listed a maiden name I had never seen anywhere else. That one piece of paper changed my entire understanding of a family line.
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Common Mistakes People Make
The biggest error is assuming that an obituary is a complete document. They rarely are. Most local obituaries from Broussard are three to five paragraphs at most. They list survivors, the funeral service details, and a short bio that usually repeats information already in the death certificate. The value is in the cross-referencing, not in any single notice. The second mistake is relying on Ancestry.com and FamilySearch alone. Those databases have some Broussard obituaries, but they are incomplete and often scanned at low resolution. I have seen entries there where the city was misread as "Breaux" when it clearly said "Broussard" in the original. The OCR just guesses sometimes. A third mistake is ignoring the Protestant and non-denominational records. The Catholic archives get all the attention, but there were significant German and Anglo families in Broussard too, and their records may be scattered between the Baptist church archives, the Methodist historical society, and the Louisiana Division of Archives in Lafayette. I only found my grandmother's sister's full obituary in the Baptist church bulletin after I stopped looking at Catholic sources, and the family is Catholic, so the misdirection made sense.
What Actually Saves Time
Start with the death certificate from the Louisiana State Archives. It gives you the exact date, the attending physician, the informant (usually a spouse or adult child), and the burial location. Then use that burial location to search cemetery records. Then use the cemetery information to narrow down which funeral home handled the arrangements. Then track down that funeral home's archived records if they still exist. That sequence cuts the search time down to about forty-five minutes for a typical post-1950 death. Searching blindly across newspaper archives without that structure can take you weeks. If you are working with deaths before 1900, the process changes because civil registration was not reliable in rural Louisiana at that point. You are mostly working with church records and cemetery burials. The date of death itself may be uncertain, so focus on the burial date as your anchor point instead. One final note: the Broussard obituaries from the last twenty years are sometimes available through online funeral home websites or platforms like Legacy.com, but the coverage is uneven and the quality of the transcriptions is poor. I have seen multiple typos in names and dates on those sites that would not appear in the actual published paper. Cross-reference anything you find there with the physical records before you commit it to your research notes.
