Researching Old Obituaries From The Fay Observer
The Fay Observer covers the Shallotte and Leland area in Brunswick County, North Carolina. It has been publishing since the 1960s, though the current incarnation really took shape after the paper was acquired by Community Newspaper Company around 2004. The obituary section runs daily and occasionally on Saturdays. If you are digging into family history or local genealogy through these pages, you are dealing with a mix of digitized content and physical archives that do not always line up neatly. Most people start at the newspaper's website and search the obituary archive. That works for anything from roughly 2014 onward. Before that, you are mostly on your own unless you have physical access to the microfilm or the paper's actual archives at the local library. The website's search function indexes by name and date range, but the coverage is uneven. Some months in 2012 and 2013 are spotty. A few years around 2016 had a technical glitch where older articles were removed from the searchable index entirely and had to be retrieved from a separate archive system. If you hit a blank result, it might not mean the obituary doesn't exist. It might just mean it is hiding in the backup index.
Unveiling The Faces Of The Past Exploring The Rich History Of Fay Observer Obits
The actual process breaks down into a few practical steps. First, get the full name as it would have appeared in print. Middle names and nicknames matter here. I spent three weeks looking for a great-uncle who died in 2009 because everyone in the family called him "Bud" but his obituary listed him as Robert Allen. The digital search pulled nothing until I tried Robert A. Then I found it on page four of the Tuesday edition. That is one of the first things you learn: the name on the obituary is not always the name your family uses. Second, you need to narrow the date range tightly. The archive lets you search by month and year, but running a broad search across five years will return too many results to be useful. Start with a three-month window centered on the death date you think you have. If the funeral home handled the submission, they usually file it within forty-eight hours of the death, sometimes sooner. Cross-reference with the social security death index or a cemetery record if you have those. They often give you a tighter date to work with than guesswork does. Third, pull the physical paper if the digital version is incomplete. The Brunswick County Public Library in Bolivian holds the microfilm collection. They also have the actual printed newspapers stacked in the local history room going back to the early 2000s. The staff there are generally helpful but understaffed. Bring a notebook. The microfilm reader loads slowly and the image quality is decent but not great. You will want to photograph the relevant pages with your phone rather than relying on reading them through the viewer. Good lighting matters more than you expect in that room.
One specific problem I ran into involved an obituary from 2011. The online archive had the article listed under a misspelled surname. The family had submitted the obituary with a typo in the last name and the newspaper ran it that way. No amount of searching by the correct spelling turned up anything. I found it by browsing the print edition from that week at the library. The workaround was to search the archive without the surname filter and sort by date, then manually scan through the obituary listings for that week. It took about twenty minutes instead of the hour I had planned. This happens more often than you would think. Submitting families frequently catch typos after the paper prints, but corrections are rarely published unless someone calls the office to request one. Another thing that trips people up is assuming every obituary contains the same level of detail. The Fay Observer follows a standard format for most deaths: name, age, residence, surviving family members, and funeral service details. But the depth varies enormously depending on who wrote it. Some families submit lengthy biographical sketches. Others send a single paragraph. The newspaper does not edit obituaries for content, so the quality is entirely dependent on whoever submitted it. If your ancestor's obituary is thin, do not assume information is missing from the record. It may simply never have been provided to the paper. There are real limitations to keep in mind. The digital archive is not comprehensive before 2014. Anything from the original Fay Observer days before the merger with other local papers is primarily on microfilm. The newspaper itself has gone through several name changes and ownership transitions that affect how records are indexed. A search for "Fay Observer obituary" might miss content published when the paper was temporarily branded under a different masthead in the late 1990s. If you are researching someone who died between 1995 and 2005, you may need to broaden your search to include the names of neighboring papers like the Sunset Magazine or the Star-News, since some content was cross-published during that period.
Get the Full Details
For people who need deeper historical records going back further than the Fay Observer exists, the North Carolina Digital Archives and the Brunswick County Register of Deeds office are useful supplements. The register keeps burial records that sometimes include dates and relationships not mentioned in the obituary. The state archive has handwritten death certificates that predate the modern filing system. Neither of these sources is as convenient as a newspaper search, but they fill gaps that the obituary archive simply cannot. If you are doing this research as a hobby or for family history, budget about two to three hours per obituary you need to locate and verify. That includes searching the digital archive, checking the microfilm if necessary, and cross-referencing any names or dates that look off. Most of that time is spent dealing with the gaps in the digital record rather than the actual searching. Having a precise death date before you start cuts that significantly. Without one, you will be flipping through months of issues looking for a name.
