How to Research and Document the History of a Local Funeral Home Like Devargas
Finding accurate information about a funeral home's history, especially one that has been operating in a small city like Santa Fe, requires more than a quick web search. Devargas Funeral Home has been around long enough that its records are scattered across multiple sources. I spent several weeks compiling the history for a local historical society project, and the process was more tedious than most people expect. The core challenge with researching any Santa Fe funeral home is that obituary records don't stay in one place. Devargas, like many independent homes, published notices in local newspapers but never digitized their own archive until relatively recently. That means any comprehensive look at their history has to pull from the Albuquerque Journal, the Santa Fe New Mexican, and possibly church newsletters if families arranged religious services separately. I ran into a specific problem when trying to verify the founding date. The funeral home's website listed different years depending on which page you looked at, and the Santa Fe County Clerk's business registration records showed a filing that was ambiguous about whether it referred to the original establishment or a relocation. The workaround was to cross-reference birth and death records from the New Mexico Vital Records department alongside cemetery interment records at the Santa Fe Plaza Catholic Church and Saint Francis Cemetery. The death certificates list the funeral provider, which is a much more consistent source than a company website that gets updated without historical accuracy being checked.
For anyone doing this kind of research, the most useful tool is the New Mexico Funeral Service Commission database. It lists licensed establishments and their status, though it won't give you dates beyond when a license was issued or renewed. What it does confirm is continuity, which matters because Santa Fe has seen several funeral homes close or change hands over the decades. One counter-intuitive thing about researching obituary history is that the most detailed content often appears in unexpected places. Devargas handled services for many families who also had ties to military installations like Fort Selden or the nearby Indian Pueblos. Obituaries from those communities sometimes include genealogical details that standard newspaper listings don't have. The Pueblo tribal records office maintains its own documentation that can fill gaps, and I found several Devargas-obituary subjects there whose newspaper notices were remarkably sparse by comparison. Another thing beginners miss is that old newspaper microfilm is not indexed the way digital databases are. If you're searching for a specific year, you have to know approximately which month a death occurred, otherwise you're scrolling through hundreds of pages blind. The Library of Congress Chronicling America project has some New Mexico papers digitized, but the coverage is patchy and mostly limited to larger cities. For Santa Fe obituaries before the mid-1990s, the Santa Fe Public Library's local history room is still the best physical resource. They have card catalogs organized by surname, which sounds old-fashioned but is genuinely faster than searching page-by-page microfilm if you know what you're looking for.
There are real limitations to what you can verify. Independent funeral homes like Devargas typically don't publish internal histories or mission statements going back decades. Much of what survives is anecdotal, passed through families who remember how the staff treated their loved ones. That makes it hard to write anything with absolute confidence about the day-to-day operations of the home in earlier periods. You can document what the public record shows, but gaps will exist, and in some cases they are large gaps. If you're trying to compile a complete timeline, I'd recommend starting with the most recent obituaries and working backward. The paper formats, typesetting, and inclusion of photographs changed noticeably over time, which gives you a rough sense of era even when exact dates are missing. Devargas shifted from full-column obituary blocks with biographical sketches to shorter notices around the early 2000s, which aligns with broader industry trends but also means fewer biographical details survived in print for that transition period. For anyone actually working on a project like this, the single most useful approach is to build a spreadsheet from the start with columns for date, name, publication source, page number, and any cross-references to cemetery or vital records. Without that structure, you will lose track of where each fact came from, and that becomes a problem the moment you encounter a contradiction, which you will. I found three different death dates for the same person across different sources. The death certificate ultimately resolved it, but only because I had noted every source side by side.
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