Finding Your Way Through the Pueblo Chieftain Obituary Archive
The Pueblo Chieftain has been publishing obituaries since the late 1800s, and their digital archive is decent but not exactly intuitive. I spent a few hours last month trying to track down a great-uncle who died in 1998, and the process was exactly as annoying as you might expect. Here is how to actually get results instead of clicking around in circles. Start at the Pueblo Chieftain website and look for their obituary section. They partner with a service called Legacy.com, which means the search interface looks like every other funeral home aggregator site you have dealt with. Enter a name, narrow the date range, and you get a list of results. Most of the time it works fine if the person died within the last fifteen years. Going further back gets messier. The date search field is your main tool. I recommend using exact death dates when you have them, because using a broad range like "1990 to 2000" returns so many results it becomes impossible to scan through. A range of six months usually covers you without drowning you. If you know approximately when someone died, don't bother searching beyond a year on either side.
Here is something most people miss: the Pueblo Chieftain archives are actually split between two systems. Recent obituaries live on the Legacy.com platform and include the full text plus photos if the family uploaded any. Older records, going back to the early twentieth century, were digitized from the newspaper microfilm and sit in a separate newspaper archive database. These two systems don't talk to each other. If a search on Legacy.com returns nothing for someone who died before 2010, you need to check the newspaper archive side directly. The interface is worse, the search is slower, and the results are often just scanned images of old newspaper pages rather than searchable text. You will be flipping through PDFs of actual newspapers looking for the death notice manually. I ran into this exact problem last year with my grandmother's sister, who died in 1973. The Legacy.com search came up empty. I had to dig into the newspaper archive, and the obituary was only a three-inch column buried on page four of the Sunday paper. It wasn't even labeled as an obituary in the digital version. I ended up finding it by searching the person's name across the entire newspaper archive for that year, then flipping through the results until I spotted the column. That took about forty minutes. Not terrible, but definitely not something I would call user-friendly. When you find an obituary in the modern system, it will typically include the person's full name, age, date of death, a short biographical paragraph, and surviving family members. Some entries from the last decade include full funeral home details and service times. The older scanned versions just have the raw newspaper text, which means you get the same information but without any of the formatting or photos. Handwriting from family-submitted notes sometimes appears in these scans, and that can be harder to read than typed text.
One thing worth noting about the Pueblo Chieftain specifically: they publish twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Obituaries typically appear within two to three days of death. If someone died on a Wednesday, the notice usually runs on the Friday edition. If they died on a Friday, it might show up the following Tuesday. This timing matters when you are trying to pin down exact dates for genealogy work. A death certificate might say someone died on the nineteenth, but the obituary won't appear until the twenty-first or twenty-second. Don't treat the obituary publication date as the date of death. They are not the same thing. If you are doing serious family history research, I would also suggest cross-referencing with the Colorado State Archives. They have a separate death index that goes back much further than the newspaper records, and it can confirm dates when the obituary itself is sparse or incomplete. Sometimes the newspaper only ran a brief notice for someone who lived a long life, while the state record will have the full death certificate information including cause of death and parents' names. The state archive requires a visit or a mailed request, so it is not as convenient, but it fills in gaps that the Chieftain simply cannot. The search function on both systems occasionally fails on unusual names or variations in spelling. I once searched for a relative whose name was registered as "Catherine" on official documents but who was listed as "Kathryn" in the obituary. The search came up empty until I tried the alternative spelling. Always have a backup name ready, especially with older records where English was often the second language for the family.
Get the Full Details
Printing or saving the obituaries is straightforward. The modern Legacy.com entries let you print directly from the browser or save as PDF. The older newspaper archive scans require you to download the individual page image. I recommend saving everything you find in a organized folder system right away, because neither platform offers any kind of personal bookmarking or saved search feature. If you come back later, you start over from scratch. The archive is free to access online. There is no paywall for the obituaries themselves, though the newspaper does push subscriptions for unlimited access to their full archive beyond obituaries. For just the death notices and biographical content, you should not need to create an account or pay anything. Just be aware that some older scanned pages may have image quality issues, especially from the 1940s and earlier, where the newsprint degradation shows through in the digitization. If you hit a dead end after trying both systems, the Pueblo County Courthouse maintains marriage and probate records that sometimes include death information not captured in the newspaper. It is another layer of research, but it has recovered people that the Chieftain archive simply never covered.
