Working With Old Obituary Listings From Shelby County Funeral Homes
I spent about four years pulling records out of file cabinets at closed funeral homes across Shelby County before I figured out a system that didn't require me to drive to every building with my truck. The obits themselves aren't hard to find once you know where the gaps are. They're easy to misread, though. That's the real problem. Most people start by searching the local newspaper archives. The commercial genealogy sites have digitized most of the Shelby County publications from 1950 onward. Before that, you're mostly on your own. I found a stack of typescript obituaries in a plastic bin behind a defunct funeral parlor off Interstate 40 that had never been entered into any database. That's where the real work happens. The paper version. The thing nobody scanned because nobody thought anyone would care about a guy named Earl who died in 1967 and was buried next to his wife in Plot 14.
Unveiling The Forgotten Histories Shelby County Funeral Home Obituary Listings That Tell Stories Older Than You Think
Here's the practical part. Start with the funeral home records directly, not the newspapers. Funeral directors often typed up their own versions of obits before sending them to papers, and those drafts contain details the published version trimmed for space. Birth dates of spouses. Names of siblings who weren't listed in the final version. The actual cause of death, which newspapers routinely softened into "passed away peacefully" or left blank entirely. I use a three-step process. First, I pull whatever is available from the major funeral homes that still operate in Shelby County. Second, I cross-reference against the cemetery records at the county clerk's office. Third, I check the older listings against city directories and census fragments to catch discrepancies. The third step catches the most problems. A funeral home might list someone as born in 1892, but the 1900 census shows them as age 6 in that year, which puts the birth around 1894. Two years off doesn't matter for casual research. It matters when you're trying to prove a lineage. The hardest edge case I ran into involved a woman listed in two separate funeral home records with different maiden names. One record said Thompson. The other said Thornton. Both appeared on headstones in the same cemetery. The answer turned out to be simpler than either: she'd been registered at the first funeral home under her married name, and the second listing was from a family member who'd heard the wrong surname at a relatives' house and filled out the paperwork that way. The newspaper obit used neither spelling correctly because the reporter heard it orally. I resolved it by pulling her marriage license from the county courthouse, which showed her legal surname at the time and confirmed the correct spelling. Takes about twenty minutes if the filing index is on microfilm and you know what box to pull.
What most people miss is the date formatting. Shelby County funeral homes switched from writing out dates as "the 3rd day of March, 1948" to numeric formats at different times depending on the house. Some did it in the late sixties. Others waited until the eighties. If you're building a timeline and one record says "March 3, 1948" while another says "03-03-1948," don't assume they're inconsistent. They're probably the same date. The variation is just the handwriting or typing style of whoever filled out the form that day. There are also gaps that have nothing to do with research skill. A flood in 2019 damaged records at one of the older funeral homes on the west side of the county. They salvaged about sixty percent of their pre-1980 files. The rest are gone. If your ancestor died between 1975 and 1982 and the family used that particular home, you're working with what the newspapers published and what cemetery records survived. There's no workaround for that except checking multiple sources to triangulate whatever fragments exist. For anyone actually doing this work, the most useful tool isn't a database subscription. It's a simple spreadsheet with columns for full name, estimated birth year, death date, funeral home, cemetery, source document type, and whether the source is original or copied. I track everything this way because the same person appears across five or six different records with slightly different information, and without a central reference, you'll end up citing the same death certificate from three different angles without realizing it.
Get the Full Details
The obituaries themselves, the full printed versions, are easier to access now than they were ten years ago. Several Shelby County funeral homes have started posting archives online, though the coverage is uneven. Some go back to the nineties. A few have digitized earlier material. The ones that haven't posted anything usually do so because they have physical boxes in a back room and the current staff doesn't see the point in spending the time. Walking in and asking politely still works sometimes, though you'll get more cooperation if you frame it as research rather than genealogy. The word genealogy triggers a different level of privacy scrutiny at places that are already cautious. If you're building a family history and hitting dead ends with Shelby County records, the funeral home obits are worth pursuing past the point where most people stop. They contain information that cemetery records don't and newspaper versions don't. The trade-off is that accessing them requires patience and an acceptance that some of what you'll find is incomplete, inconsistently formatted, or simply wrong because someone filled out a form while distracted or after a long shift. Just keep the source notation precise so you can trace any error back to its origin.
