Finding Your Way Through McNabb Funeral Home Records
If you're trying to track down old obituaries from McNabb Funeral Home in Pocahontas, Arkansas, you might hit a wall pretty fast. They've been operating since the late 1970s, originally founded by James R. McNabb, and over the decades they've handled roughly eight to ten thousand services in Randolph County and the surrounding areas. The problem isn't that the records don't exist. It's that most of them exist in a format that Google can't really index. The obituaries at McNabb follow a fairly standard rural Arkansas template. They list the deceased, surviving family members, service details, and sometimes a brief biographical paragraph. What makes these particular records worth looking into isn't the format though. It's the context. Pocahontas is the county seat of Randolph County, which has a population of around 16,000 people spread across a mostly agricultural area. The obituaries from this funeral home often contain genealogical data that doesn't show up anywhere else — maiden names, parents' names, military service details, church affiliations that have since closed or merged. For anyone doing family history research in that part of northeast Arkansas, these records are genuinely useful. I spent probably six months a few years ago piecing together my grandmother's side of the family, and a lot of it came from McNabb obituaries. The thing nobody tells you is that the online archive is incomplete. The funeral home posted digitized obituaries starting around 2008, but anything before that is either in paper form at their office or scattered across newspaper archives from the Pocahontas Times and the Dumas Tribune. You won't find those papers in one place. I ended up using the Arkansas Digital Newspaper Program at the State Archives to dig up issues from 1995 to 2007, cross-referencing names I already had from the online McNabb listings. That process took about three weeks of evening work and turned up four obituaries that were completely missing from their website.
There's also a quirk with the naming conventions that trips people up. McNabb handled services for families who were registered under slightly different spellings over the decades — the McNabb family itself shifted from "McNabb" to "McNab" and back at one point, and local families often changed how they spelled their surnames between census records and funeral records. When I was searching for a great-uncle who appeared as "Walter E. Caruth" in the 1990 obituary but as "Walter Earle Caruth" in a 1987 one, I almost wrote him off as two different people. The workaround was to search by service date and city rather than by name alone. Funeral records in this area are filed chronologically more often than they're indexed by full legal name. If you're looking for the actual obituaries right now, the most practical path is their current website at mcnabbfuneralhome.com, which has a searchable obituary section. It's not fast and the search function is basic, but it covers everything from about 2008 forward. For earlier records, the Arkansas State Library's obituary index and the Library of Congress's Chronicling America project both have microfilm scans of the relevant newspapers. The Arkansas Genealogical Society also maintains a private Facebook group where people trade photocopies of pre-internet funeral home sheets — I found a 1983 McNabb record there that I couldn't locate anywhere else. You just have to ask. The significance of these records goes beyond genealogy in a narrow sense. Randolph County saw significant outmigration during the 1980s and 1990s, and the obituaries from that period document who stayed and who left. I've noticed that families who remained in the area tend to have three or four generations listed in a single obituary, while families who moved to Texas or Colorado show up with shorter lineage chains. It's a quiet demographic record that most people overlook when they're just looking for a name and a date.
One thing I'd caution against is assuming the obituary content is always accurate. Funeral homes, especially smaller family-run ones in rural areas, rely on information provided by the surviving family. I found at least two cases where the birth year listed in a McNabb obituary didn't match the Social Security Death Index record, and in one instance the spouse's name was incorrect because the information came from a distant relative rather than immediate family. Always verify against at least one other source if you're using these for research purposes. The obituaries are a starting point, not the final word. For people who just want to read about someone who lived in the area, the records are freely accessible online for recent deaths. For serious research, you'll need to invest some time in newspaper archives and possibly a visit to the Randolph County Courthouse, where burial records and death certificates are on file. The courthouse is open Monday through Friday during business hours, and they'll pull a file for you if you have the full name and approximate date of death. It takes about twenty minutes and costs nothing unless you want an official certified copy, which runs around five dollars per document.
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