Working With The Pettus Funeral Home Obituary Archives
The obituaries at Pettus Funeral Home in Birmingham go back quite a ways. I spent a good chunk of last year tracking down death records for a family genealogy project, and the paper trail there is more useful than most people realize. The funeral home has been operating since the 1940s, which means their records cover several decades of Black families in the Birmingham area — a demographic that is often underrepresented in mainstream obituary databases. Here is the straightforward method I use when I need to dig into these records. First, you start with their website if you are looking for something recent. The newer obits are posted there, though the search function is basic. It will let you pull up a name and a date range. That is fine for the last five to ten years. Anything older than that and the website is basically useless because the records were not digitized in any meaningful way. For anything prior to roughly 2018, you have to go through the physical archives. This is where it gets interesting. The funeral home maintains a paper filing system in the back. I learned this the hard way during an initial phone call where the front desk person had no idea how to handle a request for records from 1973. She hung up. I called back two days later and asked specifically to speak to whoever handled the archival files, and eventually someone named Patricia picked up. She walked me through what was needed.
You need the full legal name of the deceased, approximate date of death, and your relationship to the person if you are requesting a certified copy. They do not give out copies to just anyone. I found that including the mother's maiden name in my original request actually helped a lot — it narrowed the search and showed I was serious. Without that detail, they spend more time verifying which death record you meant, especially for common surnames like Robinson or Jackson. The cost structure is reasonable. A photocopy runs about five dollars per page. A certified copy is twelve dollars. They accept check or money order only if you are mailing in a request. If you show up in person, they take cash or card. I showed up on a Tuesday morning around nine, which is when the office opens. Got in and out in about twenty minutes with four pages of obituary printouts from 1968. One thing that catches people off guard — and I stumbled over this too — is that the obituaries at Pettus are not always identical to what ran in the newspaper. The funeral home version sometimes includes details that the newspaper editors cut, like the surviving siblings' names, the church where services were held, or the specific cemetery plot location. The newspaper obits tend to be tighter, more formulaic. The funeral home keeps the longer family-submitted version on file. If you are doing research, the funeral home copy is worth more than the newspaper clip.
Another nuance: some of the older records, especially from the 1950s and earlier, are filed under what they call the "reception case number" rather than by name alone. The case number is essentially the funeral intake number assigned when the body first arrived. If you know this number from another document — a death certificate, a cemetery record, a will — your search becomes dramatically faster. Without it, I would estimate you are looking at twenty to forty minutes of waiting while they flip through alphabetical ledgers. With it, you are talking about five minutes. I did run into a wall trying to access records from 1943 to 1946. It turns out a flooding incident at the facility in the early 2000s damaged some of the earliest boxes. Patricia was honest about this on the phone. She told me directly that those years have gaps. So if you are searching that period, you should assume some records are simply gone and plan to pivot to the Birmingham City Cemetery records or the Jefferson County probate files instead. For people who cannot make it to Birmingham, you can mail a written request with a self-addressed stamped envelope and the appropriate payment. It usually takes about two weeks to get a response. Do not send original documents in the mail. They will not accept them and they will not return them. I learned that from a message left on their voicemail after I tried to mail a copy of a birth certificate as proof of relation. The woman on the line was patient but firm.
Get the Full Details
There is also a small collection of funeral program booklets — the ones handed out at the service — that they keep on shelves in the back room. These are not indexed online and they are not available for photocopying. You can read them there on-site. They are incredibly valuable for detailed family information that does not appear in the obituary at all: the list of pallbearers, the floral arrangements, the pastor's name, the hymns sung. One program from 1971 gave me the name of a great-uncle I had never heard mentioned in any other family document. If you are doing this kind of research regularly, I would recommend calling ahead and asking about their current archive policy. Things change. Staff turns over. The person who knew how the system worked in 2019 may have retired. The most efficient approach I have found is to go in person with a list of names and dates, prepared to wait, and bring a pen and a notebook to jot down case numbers and cross-references as you go. The records are real and they are accessible if you know how to ask for them. They are not going to make it easy for you. But they do have the information, and it is worth the effort if you are serious about building out a family history.
