Unveiling The Histories Of El Paso A Journey Through El Paso Obituaries

Reading El Paso obituary archives isn't hard, but it's more annoying than you'd think if you don't know where the gaps are.

I've spent years digging through these records for family histories and local research projects. The process is straightforward in theory — find the paper, open the page, copy the details — but the reality involves a lot of dead ends, mismatched dates, and files that existed only in microfiche before someone decided to digitize half of them. The main starting point is the El Paso Times archive. They've been publishing obituaries continuously since the 1960s, and their online archive goes back pretty far. You can search by name, date range, or keyword. The free access gives you the basics — name, date of death, sometimes a short bio. Full articles with the extended family listings usually require a subscription, which runs about fifteen to twenty dollars a month if you go that route. Beyond that, the Pecos Valley Public Library system has a microfilm collection of the El Paso Times going back to the 1900s. I used to go down there weekly when I was working on a project about migration patterns in the 1940s and 50s. The microfilm reader is the old kind with the foot pedal, and the images are sharp enough to read fine print. What they don't tell you at the desk is that the EL-PASO HERALD microfilm from 1912 to 1923 is slightly warped on reel four, so you'll miss entire columns if you don't adjust the focus ring halfway through that reel. I spent three weeks trying to read a 1918 flu epidemic obituary before I figured out the film was just misaligned on that particular section.

The Texas Digital Newspaper Program has some El Paso titles online through the Portal to Texas History. You can do full-text searches across papers like the El Paso Morning Times and the El Paso Herald. The OCR quality is decent for post-1950 issues but absolutely terrible for anything before World War Two. Names get mangled, dates shift by a day or two, and certain common surnames come back completely garbled. You have to verify everything you pull from that source against the original page if accuracy matters to you.

What you'll actually find in these records

Obituaries in El Paso follow a different pattern than you might expect if you're used to reading them from New York or Chicago. The Mexican-American funeral tradition, known as velorios, means that many obituaries include details about the wake schedule, the specific cathedral or church for the mass, and sometimes even the playlist of rancheras that will be played during the viewing. These details aren't filler — they're historically significant. They tell you about family structure, community connections, and religious affiliation in a way that a standard death notice never does. For the older Hispanic families in the area, particularly those with roots going back to the 1800s, the obituaries sometimes include the original land grant information or reference to who married into the family from another town. I once traced a lineage back to a 1848 land grant just by reading the extended family section of a 1972 El Paso Times obituary. The person who wrote it didn't know they were providing genealogical gold — they just listed all the surviving relatives and where they lived. Census data cross-referencing is where things get interesting. If you have a name and approximate death date from an obituary, you can often find that same person in the 1940 or 1950 census a decade or two earlier. The El Paso County courthouse maintains death certificates going back to 1903, and those certificates list the informant's name and relationship to the deceased. That informant is usually a spouse or adult child, which gives you a direct link to someone still living or at least listed in a nearby census record.

The problems nobody warns you about

Naming inconsistencies are the biggest headache. Hispanic surnames follow a double-surname convention that got simplified in American records. A person might be listed as Maria Guadalupe Rodriguez y Gomez in one document and Maria Rodriguez in another. In obituaries, the convention was often to list only the paternal surname, which means searching for "Gomez" will return nothing for someone who was consistently filed under "Rodriguez." I recommend searching both surnames and any obvious variants, and always checking the mother's maiden name if it appears in the extended family section. Date discrepancies between the obituary and the actual death certificate are surprisingly common. The newspaper often prints the date of the funeral rather than the date of death, or they round to the nearest week. If you're doing serious research, always pull the death certificate from the Texas Department of State Health Services. It costs eleven dollars per copy and takes about two weeks to arrive by mail, but the date of death on that document will be exact. Another issue is the incomplete coverage before 1960. Not everyone who died in El Paso County had their death noticed in the Times. Rural deaths, Native American deaths, and deaths in the Juárez hospital across the border sometimes didn't make it into the paper at all. If someone doesn't show up in the obituary index, check the funeral home records. Several funeral homes in El Paso have maintained their own ledgers going back to the 1930s, and some of those are available through the El Paso Historical Society.

A practical workflow

Start with the El Paso Times online archive. Search the person's name and narrow the date range by a few months on either side of your estimated death date. Write down everything — full name as printed, date of death, names of surviving family members, the funeral home listed. Those family member names are your next search terms. Next, check the Portal to Texas History for any older mentions. Search the name across the entire database, not just the El Paso titles. Sometimes an obituary from a smaller paper like the Sun Transfer News or the West Side News gets indexed under a different platform. Then pull the death certificate from the state. Use the exact name spelling from the obituary, but be prepared for it to differ. The certificate will give you the precise date of death, the informant's name and address, the burial location, and the attending physician. The burial location is useful — it points you to the cemetery record, which often has a plot map showing who else is interred nearby.

Finally, check the cemetery records. El Paso has several old cemeteries with their own record systems. El Paseo Memorial Park started keeping digital records in the 1980s, but earlier burials are on paper cards. The Catholic cemetery records at the Sacred Heart parish go back to the 1850s and are maintained by the archdiocese, not the county. You need to request those separately. The whole process takes me about four to six hours per person if the records are cooperative, and two to three days if there are naming conflicts or missing documents. It's slower than I'd like, but the information you get at the end — the exact timeline, the family connections, the places where people lived and died — is worth the effort. Most of what I've uncovered about my own family tree came from this exact workflow, starting with a single obituary that listed a great uncle I'd never heard of.