Unveiling The Past A Journey Through Boxwell Brothers Dumas Tx Obituaries

Tracking Down Historical Obituaries in the Texas Panhandle

Dumas, Texas sits in the southern end of Hutchinson County, about twenty miles north of Amarillo. It is a small town, population around ten thousand, which means local record keeping was always tightly wound around a handful of newspapers and churches. When you start digging into Boxwell family records there, you quickly run into the same pattern that shows up in most rural West Texas communities: the sources exist, but they are scattered across microfilm, cemetery transcriptions, and fragile clipping files that nobody digitized properly. I started looking into the Boxwell line about three years ago while helping a cousin piece together a family tree. The obituaries were the first thing that seemed useful because they contain dates, relationships, and sometimes the names of surviving children. In Dumas, that mostly means the Dumas Daily Herald archives and the local cemetery records at Elmwood Cemetery. What I found after a few weekends of work was enough to map out five generations of the family, but it took some figuring out. The first problem was that the Dumas papers stopped being fully digitized before the 1980s. The University of North Texas has a microfilm collection for many Texas newspapers through their Texas Digital Newspaper Program, and the Dumas Daily Herald is included, but browsing it by family name is not straightforward. You have to know roughly what year the death occurred. Searching by keyword inside the UNT site for "Boxwell" returns a lot of noise because the OCR picks up partial matches and fragments from adjacent columns.

My workaround was to cross-reference the Texas Death Index from the State Institute for Biomedical and Health Research. That index lists death certificate numbers and dates for every death in Texas. Once I had a box of dates from the index, I went back to the microfilm and pulled the actual obituary pages instead of relying on the full-text search. The actual printed obituaries have different wording than the digital index, and they usually include more biographical detail. This saved me probably two days of wasted browsing. Another useful source that most people overlook is the Find a Grave transcription project run by volunteers. There are several Boxwell family headstones recorded at Elmwood Cemetery, and many of those memorial pages include photos of the actual stone plus transcribed text. Some volunteers also paste in the full obituary text from the newspaper at the time of burial. I found three Boxwell obituaries this way that did not appear in any digital newspaper database. The tradeoff is that these transcriptions are not verified, so you still need to confirm against the original paper if you are doing this for legal or formal genealogical purposes. The Hutchinson County Clerk's office also keeps marriage and death records, but they do not release full obituary texts. They can provide death certificate copies for $21 each, which is helpful for confirming a date but not for getting the narrative content of the obituary itself. You need the newspaper for that part.

One thing that trips people up is the difference between an actual obituary and a death notice. A death notice is just a factual announcement: name, age, date of death, funeral information. An obituary usually includes a biography, survivors, career, military service, and church affiliations. In a town like Dumas, most of the longer family histories appear in the obituary section of the Sunday edition. The daily edition tends to carry only the bare death notices. If you are looking for the Boxwell brothers specifically, you want the Sunday paper. I spent an afternoon pulling Monday editions expecting to find them, only to realize the stories had been in Saturday's paper the week before. There is also a quirk with older obituaries where the spelling of the surname varied. Boxwell appears as Boxwell, Boxwall, and occasionally Boxwell in handwritten records. The newspaper typesetters sometimes made errors, and later digitization does not correct them. I ran into this with a 1942 obituary where the family name was set as "Boxwell" but the body text referred to "Boxwell Bros." in a way that clearly pointed to a different person. Checking the adjacent column obituaries from the same week resolved the confusion, because the families were buried next to each other in Elmwood. If you want to search more efficiently, I recommend downloading the microfilm yourself from the UNT site or using the Chronicling America portal, which sometimes has page-level images even when the text search fails. Chronicling America covers the Dumas Daily Herald from 1920 through 1963, which is exactly the window where most of the older Boxwell records fall. The image quality is decent for the most part, and you can zoom in to read cramped columns.

For records after 1963, the situation gets harder. The Dumas Herald did not migrate to a digital format that preserves searchable text until the late 1990s, and even then the archive is behind a paywall on Newspapers.com. I have seen references to the same Boxwell obituaries on Newspapers.com for about $15 a month, but the access is not guaranteed if the platform changes its policy. A smaller local library in Amarillo sometimes has bound volumes on microfilm for free, which is worth checking before you subscribe to anything. The most useful single resource I found was a compiled index of Hutchinson County deaths that a local historian put together in the 1990s. It is not online, but it exists in the Dumas Public Library reference section. The librarian let me copy the relevant pages without an appointment. That index lists over four hundred deaths from 1890 to 1990 with page citations to the newspaper. Using that index cut my search time from roughly an hour down to about ten minutes per person. There are some limitations you should be aware of. Not every Boxwell family member who died in Dumas was buried there. Several relatives were moved to Amarillo or returned to their hometowns for burial, and their obituaries might have been published in the destination city instead. I encountered this when one brother's obituary appeared in the Amarillo Times Democrat rather than the Dumas paper, even though he had lived in Dumas his entire life. Checking the surrounding counties in the death index would have caught that earlier.

Another gap is that World War II and Korean War era obituaries sometimes omit military details due to privacy practices of the time, even when the deceased received the Medal of Honor or other high decorations. The personal recollections in the family papers filled in some of those blanks, but they were never formally recorded in the newspaper text. If you are building a complete picture, you need to supplement the obituaries with VA records and family letters. For anyone starting this kind of research, the practical sequence is: pull the death index first, identify the Boxwell entries, check the county clerk for certificate numbers, use the local historian's index for newspaper citations, then go to the UNT microfilm or Chronicling America for the actual text. Work Sunday editions for longer pieces. Verify against Find a Grave photos but do not treat them as primary sources. If you hit a wall, check Amarillo papers for out-of-town burials. That order saved me weeks of dead ends.