Reading Obituaries in San Antonio: What Actually Works
I spent about three years pulling obituary records for clients doing family history work in Bexar County. The process is less glamorous than it sounds, and the record-keeping situation here is a mix of genuinely good sources and frustrating gaps. Most people start with the obvious places, hit dead ends, then wonder why their research stalled. I will walk through what to do, what to avoid, and where the records actually live. The primary digital source most people find is the MySA platform, which is the website for the San Antonio Report newspapers. It covers deaths and memorial notices dating back roughly to the early 2010s with search functionality that is functional but not great. Beyond that, you have the old San Antonio Light, which was folded into the Report and has some archived content, plus the long-running San Antonio Express-News obituary section. Neither of those is particularly well-organized for deep historical research. Here is the part that trips people up: the MySA search is keyed primarily by last name and first name, with optional date range filters. The date field does not reliably parse dates before 2015. If you are looking for someone who died in 2008 and only enter the year 2008, the search will either return nothing or give you unrelated results from the classifieds section that mention the same name. I learned this the hard way when a client was looking for her grandmother, born in 1920, died in 2006. I searched MySA with just the death year and got zero hits for five hours before I realized I needed to include the first name and adjust the date range to something wider, like 2004 to 2010. Even then, the result was buried under three dozen unrelated notices. The workaround is to search by the funeral home name if you can find it from other sources, or to use the newspaper archives directly rather than the main search page.
For records before digitization, you need to go through the Bexar County Clerk's office or use a subscription genealogy site. Ancestry.com has a Texas Death Records collection that covers Bexar County from about 1903 onward, and it is fairly comprehensive for the mid-twentieth century. FamilySearch has some microfilmed obituary indexes at the San Antonio Public Library's main branch on Commerce Street. The index cards go back to the 1970s or so, but they are not fully digitized, so you either visit in person or ask a researcher to pull them. The main San Antonio Public Library also keeps a local history room with physical copies of the Express-News and Light on microfilm, which goes back much further than any online database. The Express-News maintains its own obituary archive, but access requires a subscription or a library card at certain branches. The FreeZone at the central library gives you free computer access, which includes the newspaper archive. If you are not in the area, your best bet is to contact the Express-News archives department directly at 210-209-4141. They charge a research fee, usually around $25 for the first half hour and $15 per additional half hour, and they do not guarantee results for records before 1998 because those were not always indexed properly at the time of publication. Another source people overlook is the religious institutions. Catholic parishes in the Diocese of San Antonio kept burial registers that sometimes note when an obituary was published, and those registers are held at the diocesan archive downtown. It is a pain to request, but if the person you are researching was Hispanic and died before the 1990s, the English-language newspaper obituaries may be sparse or nonexistent while the church record will have the full details including maiden names and parents' names.
Here is a practical workflow that saves time. Start with FamilySearch or Ancestry to establish the basic death facts. Pull the death certificate from the Texas Department of State Health Services if the death occurred within the last seventy-five years. The certificate will list the funeral home, and the funeral home often keeps copies of the obituary they submitted to the newspaper. That paper trail gets you farther than chasing newspaper archives alone. Then cross-reference with the MySA database using a wide date range, not the exact death year. Finally, check the Bexar County Pioneer Cemetery records if the person was buried at Evergreen Cemetery or one of the older municipal graveyards, because those records predate most newspaper coverage. The biggest limitation with MySA specifically is that it does not cover the full history of death notices in San Antonio. It is a modern database that reflects current newspaper operations. If someone died in 1985, you will not find it there. You need to move to microfilm, physical archives, or subscription genealogy platforms. And even with those, the quality of the original obituary itself varies wildly. Some were detailed biographical sketches. Some were two sentences with a list of survivors. The newspaper did not standardize obituary length or content until the 2000s, so earlier records are inconsistent by design. If you are working on a specific case and want a direct link to start with, the MySA obituary search is at mysaintantonio.com and you can navigate to the Obituaries section from the main menu. The Express-News archives require a separate login through their website at expressnews.com, and the Bexar County Clerk's death records are searchable at bexar.org under the Vital Records section. For the Catholic diocesan archive, you need to submit a research request through the Archdiocese of San Antonio website, which is archsanant.org.
Get the Full Details
The whole process usually takes me about four to six hours per individual record when I am pulling from multiple sources, though straightforward cases from after 2010 can be done in under an hour since MySA covers most of those. Cases from before 1970 routinely take eight to twelve hours because you are coordinating between microfilm, physical archives, and possibly church records. There is no shortcut that eliminates that variance, and anyone promising you can find a 1960s San Antonio obituary in thirty minutes is not being honest about what the record base actually looks like.
