Reading Deseret News Obituaries Is More Useful Than Most People Realize
I spent about three years helping families piece together genealogy for clients in the Salt Lake City area, and the Deseret News archives turned out to be one of the most valuable resources we had. Not because they're perfect, but because they cover a massive demographic that other sources miss. FamilySearch, Ancestry, and newspapers.com all have coverage, but they're inconsistent with certain time periods and communities. The process starts at the Deseret News website or their archive partner, but there's a practical approach that saves hours. Most people search by name only and get overwhelmed. Start with the date range and narrow it down to a 3-5 year window around when your ancestor likely died. If you know the county, filter by Salt Lake County first. The obituary index from the 1980s onward is the most complete section. Here's what nobody tells you about searching these obituaries: the formatting changed significantly in 2004 when the Deseret News moved its archival system. Pre-2004 entries are scanned images with inconsistent OCR quality. Post-2004 entries are searchable text but the metadata fields are incomplete. You'll find more actual content by reading the full scanned page for older records rather than relying on the text search, which frequently misses maiden names and alternate spellings.
I ran into a specific problem last year trying to track down a great-uncle who died in 1991. His name was listed as "Robert James Miller" in most records, but the obituary had him as "Bob J. Miller." The search returned nothing until I switched to browsing the December 1991 funeral notices section directly. The newspaper kept full-page funeral sections where even abbreviated notices showed the correct spelling. That notice then pointed to a longer obituary in the January 2nd edition that had the full biographical details I needed. For the digitized obituaries, you're going to want to download or screenshot everything before you close the tab. The Deseret News archive access sometimes times out during peak hours, and losing a saved search is frustrating. The free tier gives you limited access to the full archive. If you're doing serious research, a subscription through the newspaper or a library partnership account makes the difference between spending two days and two hours on a single family line. The obituaries themselves contain information that official death certificates don't always capture. Survivor lists, church affiliations, military service details, employer history, and neighborhood references all appear in the text. I found a woman's maiden name through her husband's obituary listing her as "survived by his wife Mary Anne, daughter of Helen and George Patterson of Provo." That single sentence connected two branches of a family tree that had been stuck for decades.
There are real limitations you need to account for. The Deseret News obituary coverage drops off significantly before 1950. Earlier records exist but you'll need to check local church publications, county historical societies, and the Utah State Archives for pre-1950 notices. The coverage is also skewed toward the Wasatch Front population. If your ancestor died in a rural area like San Juan County or outside the Salt Lake metropolitan area, the obituary may have appeared in a different paper entirely. Another issue: the index sometimes has death dates that don't match the actual publication date. Always verify against the date on the obituary itself. I've seen at least a dozen cases where the index listed a death date that was wrong by several months, which threw off correlation with SSDI and Social Security records. For anyone working with this material, I recommend cross-referencing every Deseret News obituary you find with the Utah Death Certificate database at the state health department website. The death certificates provide the precise date and location of death, cause of death, and informant name, which often reveals a relative you didn't know was still alive at the time. The combination of both sources usually resolves questions that either document alone cannot answer.
Get the Full Details
Download or print the full obituary page whenever possible. The online text versions sometimes drop photographs, which can show a home address, employer logo, or military unit insignia that provides additional leads. Those visual details are gone from the plain-text version.
