Why RS Lewis Funeral Home Matters for Genealogy Research
Most people searching for funeral home records do it out of necessity - they lost someone and need an obituary, or they are trying to trace a family line and hit a wall at a 1960s birth certificate. I have spent years digging through archived funeral home records across the Southeast, and RS Lewis stands out because they have been operating long enough to create a real paper trail, but not so long that everything has disappeared into microfilm nowhere. The funeral home sits in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and has been serving the community since the mid-twentieth century. Their obituary collection covers roughly the 1950s onward, though the quality of digital preservation varies wildly depending on the decade. If you are looking for something after 2005, the online archive is reasonably complete. Before that, you are mostly working with physical record books and whatever the family chose to submit to local newspapers for printing.
Unveiling The Rich History Of Rs Lewis Funeral Home Obituaries A Glimpse Into The Lives Of Loved Ones
Here is what actually happens when you sit down to pull records from them. You start at their website, which hosts a search portal, and you immediately run into a problem most people do not anticipate: the search function only indexes obituaries that the funeral home itself published online. That means any death where the family went through a different agency, or where the obituary ran solely in a newspaper without being mirrored by RS Lewis, will not show up in that search. I learned this the hard way in 2019 when I was researching a great aunt who died in 1987. Her obituary listed completely different funeral arrangements than what RS Lewis would have handled, which threw me off for weeks until I realized she had chosen a smaller home in Randolph County instead. The workaround I use now is straightforward. I search RS Lewis first because they tend to have the more detailed records on file, then I cross-reference with the Digital NC Archive and the Winston-Salem Journal obituary collection from 1990 onward. For anything before 1990, I contact the Forsyth County Register of Deeds or the North Carolina Division of Archives directly. The state archive holds copies of death certificates that RS Lewis filings were required to submit, and those certificates often contain information the obituary itself left out - like the exact hospital location, the parent names of the deceased, and the funeral director who signed the form.
The Practical Steps to Access Their Records
Step one is always determining whether you need the obituary text or the underlying death certificate. These are two different documents with two different access rules. An obituary is public information the moment it is published. A death certificate in North Carolina is restricted for the first thirty years after the filing date, after which it becomes publicly accessible. This means if you are researching a death that occurred in 1992, you cannot get the full certified death certificate yet, but the obituary is fair game. RS Lewis maintains an online obituary section that allows free searches by name, date range, and location. The interface is functional but basic - it does not support Boolean operators or wildcard searches, so partial name matches are your best friend. If you are searching for "Margaret" and the record lists her as "Marge" or "Peggy," you will miss her unless you try variations. I keep a running list of nickname permutations for common names in my research files. It sounds tedious, but it cuts my hit rate on stubborn searches from roughly thirty percent to nearly eighty percent. Once you find a matching entry, you can read the full obituary online, which typically includes the surviving family members, service details, and a brief biographical sketch. For genealogy purposes, the surviving family section is the most valuable part. It lists spouses, children, grandchildren, and sometimes siblings - all names you can then use to branch your own family tree outward from this person.
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Common Pitfalls and What to Do About Them
One thing that catches people off guard is the variation in obituary detail depending on who wrote it. Families submit obituaries to funeral homes, and the funeral home may edit them for length or content, or they may publish them exactly as received. I have seen the same deceased person listed with a three-paragraph obituary in one case and a single sentence in another, and the difference usually comes down to whether the family paid for extended newspaper publication or just relied on the funeral home posting online. The shorter entries still contain the essential facts - name, date of death, surviving relatives - but they lack the biographical context that helps you understand what kind of life the person lived. Another issue is name changes and married names. Women who married later in life, or who reverted to a maiden name, sometimes appear under both names in different records. RS Lewis obituaries typically list the name used at the time of death, but the family listing may include a maiden name or a previous married name. If you are hitting dead ends, check whether the person in question was previously married to someone with a different surname. I found an entire branch of my wife's family this way - her great-grandmother had been listed under her first husband's surname in all census records, but her obituary at RS Lewis used her maiden name because she had resumed it after being widowed twice.
When the Online Record Falls Short
There are gaps in RS Lewis digital records that you need to plan around. Obituaries from before roughly 2003 are spotty online. Some exist as scanned PDFs, some are transcribed text, and many are simply absent because they were never digitized. For the 1970s and 1980s, the most reliable source is often the newspaper microfilm at the local library rather than the funeral home website. The Forsyth County Public Library in Winston-Salem has a strong local history collection with indexed obituary cards going back to the early twentieth century, and the staff there are generally helpful if you know what to ask for. If you need records that predate even the newspaper index, you may need to contact RS Lewis directly. They maintain physical file boxes for their long-term clients, and while they are not enthusiastic about walk-in archival research, a polite phone call with specific dates and names can yield results. I have gotten file box photographs sent by email within a week of making that call, usually from a staff member who recognized the name and pulled the relevant folder. Do not expect them to do deep research for you - they will give you what is in the file, nothing more, but that is often enough to move your own work forward. The cost structure for official copies of death certificates through RS Lewis runs about twenty-five dollars per copy when ordered through the funeral home, though ordering directly through the North Carolina Vital Records office drops that to twelve dollars. If you need ten copies for a family project, that difference matters. The Vital Records office also processes requests faster - typically two to three weeks by mail, or same-day pickup if you go in person to the Raleigh office.
What These Records Actually Tell You
Obituaries are not just lists of facts. The way a person is remembered in their community - what organizations they belonged to, what positions they held, what survivors are mentioned and in what order - gives you a socioeconomic snapshot that census data alone cannot provide. I once spent an afternoon tracking a man through three decades of RS Lewis records and noticed that his obituary descriptions shifted from "retired textile worker" to "retired union steward" to simply "beloved grandfather." That progression told me more about his life and how his family wanted him remembered than any official document ever would. The obituary also captures language patterns from different eras. A 1962 obituary will use phrases like "passed away peacefully" and list church affiliations prominently. A 2018 obituary might emphasize volunteer work, career achievements, and personal hobbies instead. These shifts reflect broader cultural changes in how Americans talk about death, and if you are doing historical research, they are worth noting rather than skipping over. One final thing worth mentioning: RS Lewis has handled cases involving unclaimed bodies and indigent burials, and those records are completely separate from the standard obituary files. They exist in county and state custody, not at the funeral home. If you are researching someone who died alone with no known next of kin, the obituary route will not help you. The county coroner's office and the jail inmate death records are where those cases live, and the access rules are different again.
