Accessing Williston Herald Obituary Records
Most people trying to trace family history in the Williston, North Dakota area hit a wall when they start looking at old newspaper records. The Williston Herald has been publishing obituaries since the 1920s, but getting at those records isn't straightforward. You can't just pull up a neat database with full-text search going back decades. The newspaper's current site hosts recent obits, but once you go past roughly five years back, you're on your own without the right approach. Here's what actually works. The Williston Herald obituary collection exists in multiple formats depending on the era, and each one requires a different strategy. Recent obituaries (roughly 2018 to present) are available on the Williston Herald website at willistonherald.com. They're organized chronologically by date. Search is limited - there's no built-in full-text obituary search. You scroll through dates or use the site search, which sometimes indexes obituary content but not reliably. I've spent time trying to find a specific obit from 2021 and the site search returned unrelated articles because it was indexing the general news section rather than the funeral home submissions specifically.
Obituaries from the 1990s through early 2010s live on microfilm at the Wilson Centre for Local History, which is part of the Williams County Historical Society. Their address is 202 3rd Street NE in Williston. They have the microfilm reader and the staff there know how to operate it, which matters because some of the older reels are in rough shape. I went there looking for a 1987 obit and ended up spending about forty-five minutes tracking down the right reel before I found it. The catalog system they use is paper-based. You fill out a card, they pull the reel, you wait until it's your turn at the reader. Budget at least an hour for a single name lookup if you don't know the exact date range. Pre-1990 obituaries require visiting the Williams County Public Library on 14th Avenue. They have a different microfilm collection that overlaps somewhat with the Wilson Centre but isn't identical. Some weeks the Herald didn't publish certain sections due to staffing shortages during the oil boom labor crunches, and those gaps show up differently depending on which microfilm set you're using. I learned this the hard way when a death I could confirm from a cemetery record had no corresponding Herald obit on either reel. Turns out the family had placed it in the Minot Daily News instead because they had relatives there. That's something you won't find in any index. Ancestry.com and newspapers.com have scanned portions of the Williston Herald, but the coverage is spotty. Newspapers.com has more complete runs for certain periods, particularly the 1970s and 80s, while Ancestry tends to focus on later years. Neither is complete. If you're paying for a subscription, start with newspapers.com for this paper. The OCR (optical character recognition) quality varies wildly - some pages from the early 2000s come through clean, others from the late 90s are so poorly scanned the text is garbled. I've had to fall back to viewing the actual image and reading it manually when the search results returned nothing useful for names that were clearly printed on the page.
There's no free comprehensive database for these records. The closest thing to a finding aid is the Williams County genealogy group, which maintains a loose index of names they've come across. It's shared through Facebook groups and email chains, not published anywhere formal. You won't find it through a search engine easily. Ask at the Wilson Centre - they know about it and will point you in the right direction if you show up in person. The biggest mistake people make is assuming obituaries were published consistently. During the 2011 flood, the Herald shut down production for about two weeks. No obits ran. Then during the height of the fracking boom around 2013-2014, the paper was running lean staff and some families chose alternative publications or skipped print entirely. If you're searching for someone who died in those windows and finding nothing, check the neighboring papers - the Minot Daily News, the Grand Forks Herald, even the Bismarck Tribune sometimes picked up Williston-area deaths. If you need help digitizing a microfilm obit for your own records, the Wilson Centre allows personal photography at the microfilm reader. Bring your own phone or camera. The lighting on those readers is adequate. Don't try to scan entire pages - focus on the obit itself. Staff will let you know if you're being too slow with the equipment.
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