Working with Anders Funeral Home Obituary Records
I spent a stretch of my career going through obituary files for a genealogy research firm. A lot of that work centered around local funeral homes, and Anders Funeral Home came up more often than most. Their records are solid, but they're not easy to navigate if you don't know what you're looking for. The process starts with understanding where their obituaries actually live. Anders maintains their own website with a searchable obituary section, but the online versions are usually abbreviated. The full, original obituary — the one that ran in the local newspaper and sometimes includes things like service attendees, pallbearers, and specific charitable donation preferences — is held in their physical archives. You can request access by calling the main office during business hours. They're not hostile about it, but they do require a valid reason. Genealogy research counts. So does legal matters involving estates. The search tool on their site lets you filter by name, date range, and location. It's basic. The date range picker is particularly finicky. If you type in a range like 1998 to 2003 and hit search, you might get results from 2004 mixed in. I learned to narrow it to single years at a time instead of using broad ranges. That one change cut my average search session from about forty minutes down to fifteen.
What most people miss is that the obituary isn't always the full story. Anders Funeral Home also keeps separate service programs, which are pamphlets handed out at the actual funeral or memorial. Those programs often list far more detail — military honors received, specific veterans groups involved, church affiliations, even which casket was selected. I pulled one once for a man whose obituary said he was a "beloved father and veteran" and the service program revealed he'd been a master sergeant in the Air Force with deployments to both Germany and Japan, plus he was a founding member of the local VFW post. The obituary had mentioned none of it. Requesting those programs requires a separate conversation. You have to call the funeral home directly and ask. The staff will usually tell you they're available for immediate family only, but that's not actually their policy. Anyone who paid for the service or can establish a relationship to the deceased can request a copy. I've gotten them through email with just a phone call first. The trick is being polite and specific. "I'm researching my great-uncle's service history for a family project" gets you further than "I need the service program for John Smith." There are real limitations here. The online obituary database goes back roughly to the early 2000s. Before that, you're dealing with paper records or microfilm at the county library. Anders has digitized a lot of older material, but not everything. If you're looking for someone who died before 2000 and you can't find them online, your next step is the county clerk's office where the death certificate would be filed. That document is public record in most states, though some require you to be related to the deceased or show a tangible interest. Idaho, where Anders operates out of, is relatively open about this.
Another thing to keep in mind: obituaries are written by the family, not by the funeral home. That means they contain whatever information the family chose to include, which is often very little. Names of surviving siblings might be missing. Causes of death are frequently omitted. I've seen three different obituaries for the same person where each listed a different profession, a different place of birth, and a different surviving spouse. The death certificate is the only thing that's consistent across all of them. If you're doing this research for legal purposes, don't rely on the obituary alone. Cross-reference with the death certificate, the service program, and any newspaper archives. The obituary is a starting point, not a source. I've had cases where an obituary claimed someone predeceased their spouse, but the death certificate showed the spouse died first. That kind of discrepancy matters when you're dealing with inheritance questions. The cost side is straightforward. Searching the online database is free. Requesting a physical copy of an obituary from the archives runs about twenty-five dollars. Service programs are usually ten to fifteen dollars if they're available. Payment is by credit card over the phone. They don't do wire transfers or money orders for these requests, which caught me off guard the first time I tried.
Get the Full Details
People who need this information urgently sometimes skip straight to third-party genealogy sites that claim to have Anders records indexed. Those sites are unreliable. They scrape whatever's publicly available and often get dates wrong or mix up people with the same name. I've seen multiple instances where a John Anderson from Idaho Falls got lumped in with a John Anderson from Pocatello. Just go through the official channels. It takes longer but the information is correct. The one edge case that actually drove me crazy was when someone died at a hospital outside Anders' service area but their funeral was handled there. The online obituary might list the hospital as the place of death, which puts it in a completely different county. When I was tracking down a death certificate for someone who died at a Boise hospital but had their services at Anders in Twin Falls, I searched Boise records first and found nothing. The death certificate was filed in Twin Falls because that's where the funeral director filed it. One extra hour of searching that I could have avoided by checking both counties from the start. And that's basically how you work through this. Start with the online obituary, pull what you can from it, then call the funeral home for the deeper records. Verify against the death certificate. Don't assume the obituary has everything it needs to have.
