How To Actually Research Old Obituaries From The Albuquerque Journal
The Albuquerque Journal has been publishing obituaries since the late 1800s, but getting at that material is not straightforward if you are coming to it cold. Most people hit a wall pretty quickly because the paper does not offer a clean searchable archive going back very far, and genealogy sites rarely index New Mexico local papers with any consistency. I spent three days last year tracking down a single obituary for my great-uncle who died in 1974, and here is what actually worked. Before I go into the mechanics, a note on why this is harder than it sounds. The Journal moved to a digital format relatively late compared to papers in larger markets, and their early web archive is spotty at best. Anything before roughly 1997 is going to require physical or microfilm access. I learned this the hard way when I requested a PDF of a 1982 obituary through their website and got an auto-reply telling me to visit the newspaper's office in person with a valid ID and a citation. Here is the practical path.
Step one: Get a precise date range. You need the approximate date of death, or at least the month and year. Without that, you are digging through thousands of pages blind. I keep a spreadsheet for anyone I research now, logging estimated dates, full names including middle initials, and any known aliases. This matters more than you would think because New Mexican naming conventions can throw off searches. A person listed as "Robert James Garcia" in one obit might appear as "Bob J. Garcia" in another index entry. Getting the date right cuts your search time from hours to minutes on microfilm. Step two: Check the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives. They hold microfilm copies of the Journal going back to 1880. The reading room is on the third floor of the Record Center on South Street in Santa Fe, about an hour south of Albuquerque. You can call ahead and ask them to pull the specific reel for your date range before you drive up. The cost is five cents per photocopy or sixty cents per microfilm frame save. I saved twenty frames one afternoon and spent about fourteen dollars total. It was worth it because the images are crisp and legible, unlike the degraded scans you sometimes get from commercial genealogy sites. Step three: Use the Albuquerque Public Library system if you cannot make it to Santa Fe. The main branch on Central Avenue has microfilm readers and a collection of Journal issues on reel. They do not have the complete run, but they have substantial coverage from the 1950s onward. The staff there is used to helping people hunt through obituaries, and they will let you use the reader for up to two hours without charging anything. I have never had a librarian give me grief about spending that full two-hour window. Bring a notebook and write down the volume number, date, and page number for every obit you find before you leave. The microfilm jumps around in ways that make it easy to lose your place.
Step four: Look at the Journal's own online archive if you are working with recent decades. They partner with a service called NewsBank for digitized issues, and some library systems offer free access to NewsBank with a valid library card. If you have a card from any New Mexico public library, try logging into their NewsBank portal from home. The search interface is clunky, but it indexes obituaries with full text, so you can search by last name and narrow by date. One thing most people miss: the full-text search sometimes picks up mentions of a deceased person in unrelated articles, like a funeral announcement in the society pages or a mention in a local business column. Always verify that the result you found is actually the obituary itself and not a reference to one. Step five: Try the Hispanic National Historical Society archives if your ancestor was part of New Mexico's long-settled families. They have a small but significant collection of Spanish-language and early Anglo obituaries from the Territory period through the early twentieth century. The finding aids are not digitized, so this requires another trip or a phone call to request a search. I used this route when the standard microfilm path hit a gap for an ancestor who died in 1911 during a period where the Journal's publication was interrupted by a printers' strike. The society had a scanned copy of that specific issue that no other repository held. There are downsides to all of this, and I should be straight about them. Microfilm research is tedious and physically straining on your eyes and back. The reading room at the State Records Center gets uncomfortably warm in summer, and the chairs are not designed for long sitting. You also have to be careful about what you assume from an obituary. These pieces were written by family members or funeral homes, not by journalists doing investigative reporting, and they routinely contain errors in dates, misspellings of place names, and invented relationships. I once spent two weeks tracing a lineage based on an obituary that listed a parent's birth year wrong by seven years, which sent me down a completely false census branch. Always treat the text as a starting point, not a source of final facts.
Get the Full Details
If you are looking for something more recent, say after 2005, you might also check Legacy.com or Ancestry.com, but their coverage of the Journal is inconsistent and often limited to the last fifteen to twenty years. Neither site is reliable for anything older than that without cross-referencing against the physical archive. The real value in these obituaries is not just the name and date but the biographical details buried in the body of the notice, especially for families who do not keep personal records. A well-written Journal obit from the 1960s or 1970s will often list the deceased's military service, union affiliation, church, and the names of surviving siblings with their spouses' names, which is the kind of detail that unlocks census and draft records you could not otherwise connect.
