How to Actually Find Obituaries at Pisarski Funeral in Stevens Point
I spent about three weeks last winter helping my grandmother track down some old obituaries from the Stevens Point area. Her family had scattered across Wisconsin over the decades, and we needed confirmation of dates, relationships, and military service records for a family history project. What I learned during that process turned out to be more useful than anything I'd read in a quick search. Pisarski Funeral Home in Stevens Point has been around since 1947. That matters when you are doing genealogy work because it means they have been handling obituaries in Portage County for almost eighty years. Most of their recent listings stay on their own website, but going further back requires a slightly different approach than you would use for a funeral home that opened five years ago.
Unveiling The Past A Journey Through Pisarski Funeral Stevens Point Obituaries
Their current obituary page is organized by last name. You can type a full name or just a surname and it pulls up matching entries from the past thirty days or so. This works fine if you just need to read a recent service announcement or find service details for an upcoming viewing. It does not work well if you are searching for someone who died in 1998 or earlier. For older records, you need to go through the Stevens Point Journal archives. Pisarski has been publishing obituaries there for decades. The Journal's website has a search function, but it is not great. You will need to use advanced search operators or dig through archived newspaper PDFs. I found myself spending most of my time on the Paper of Record site and on FamilySearch's digitized newspaper collection rather than on Pisarski's actual site for anything before 2010. One thing most people miss is that Pisarski occasionally posts extended versions of obituaries on their site that never made it into the newspaper. These extended versions sometimes include family trees, career histories, and lists of survivors that the print version left out for space reasons. I ran into this when researching a great-uncle. The newspaper listing was two paragraphs long and barely mentioned his service in Vietnam. The extended Pisarski version included his unit, his rank, and a photo of him in uniform. That photo ended up being the only clear image of him I ever found.
If you are trying to contact the funeral home directly for older records, call them during weekday business hours between ten and two. They can look up records from their own files, but they will not release everything. Wisconsin law protects certain details, and they tend to be cautious about giving out information to anyone who is not an immediate family member. Bring a government-issued ID and be prepared to explain your relationship to the deceased. They are generally helpful once they know you are serious about this. Their website does not have a search function that goes back more than a few years. I tried using the Wayback Machine to access archived versions of their site, but the coverage is spotty. Some months from 2015 to 2019 simply have no saved snapshots. You will get better results searching the Journal's archive directly. Another thing that helps is knowing the cemetery. Pisarski handles a lot of services at Roselawn Memorial Park and at St. Joseph's Cemetery in Stevens Point. If you can confirm where someone is buried, you can cross-reference cemetery records with the obituary listings. The Portage County Clerk's office also maintains death certificates that go back to the early nineteen hundreds. These are public records, though you do need to request copies and pay a small fee per document.
Get the Full Details
Sometimes the obituary will list a different funeral home if the family chose one outside the area. Pisarski is local, but people move. I found an obituary for a cousin who died in Madison but had her services handled by a funeral home there even though she grew up in Stevens Point. Make sure you are not assuming the local Pisarski listing covers everyone with a Portage County connection. There are downsides to relying solely on Pisarski's online presence. Their website has not been redesigned in several years and the search functionality is basic. The mobile version is functional but slow to load on older articles. They do not have obituaries indexed in a way that Google can easily scrape, so searching from outside their site will not get you comprehensive results. You have to go to their website directly or use the newspaper archives I mentioned. If you need something fast and simple, Pisarski's site will get you through a recent obituary in about two minutes. If you are doing real genealogical research, plan on spending a few hours across multiple sources. Combine their site with the Journal archives, check the cemetery records, and look for any extended versions they may have posted. That combination worked for me and turned a project that felt impossible into something I finished in about ten days.
The contact information for Pisarski Funeral Home is straightforward. They are located on West Main Street in Stevens Point. Their phone number is listed on their website along with directions and hours. If you are in the area, stopping by during visiting hours is an option, but calling ahead is better. They deal with a lot of grieving families and appreciate heads up before a walk-in. I keep a folder on my computer with screenshots of every obituary I find through this process. The websites change, pages get updated, and old listings sometimes disappear without warning. Having your own backup saves you from having to hunt everything down again if something gets taken offline. I learned that the hard way when a cousin's obituary vanished from the Journal's site after they moved everything to a new platform. I had it archived but others did not and they were upset about it. The whole process is not complicated. It just requires patience and the willingness to look in more than one place. Pisarski is a solid starting point for Stevens Point area obituaries, but it is not the only point. The newspaper archives, cemetery records, and direct contact with the funeral home all fill in gaps that the website alone cannot cover. That is how I ended up with the information I needed and it is how most people should approach this kind of research.
