Unveiling The Secrets Of Wjrt TV 12 News Obituaries Finding Recent Death Notices

Finding WJRT TV 12 News Obituaries and Death Notices: A Practical Guide

WJRT-TV 12 is the ABC affiliate covering the Flint, Michigan area and surrounding communities in Mid Michigan. Their obituary and death notice section sits on their website and serves as a local resource for people trying to track down recent passing notices in the region. It isn't the most comprehensive source out there, but it covers a decent slice of the local population, and if someone from the Flint area died recently, there's a solid chance their notice ended up published there. The website is wjrt.com. From the homepage, you navigate to the news section and look for a link labeled "Obituaries" or "Death Notices." It usually lives in the local news area, sometimes nested under a "Community" or "News" dropdown menu. The layout changes occasionally as the site gets restructured, so if you don't see it right away, try using the search function on the page and typing "obituary" or "death notice."

Unveiling The Secrets Of Wjrt TV 12 News Obituaries Finding Recent Death Notices

Here's the thing nobody tells you about local TV station obituary pages: they rarely display results in a clean chronological list by default. When you land on the obituaries page at wjrt.com, you'll typically see the most recent notices featured at the top, but digging into older notices or specific names requires using their internal search. The search function on their site is basic, and it doesn't always handle misspellings or alternate name formats well. If you're searching for "Robert Smith" and the notice runs "Bob Smith," you might come up empty. I learned that the hard way when I was tracking down a notice for an elderly relative whose family had used his nickname on every public document. The actual obituary content varies. Some entries are full-length articles written by the newspaper or the funeral home and syndicated to the TV station's website. Others are just brief death notice blurbs with minimal biographical detail — usually just the person's name, age, date of death, and which funeral home is handling arrangements. The longer ones tend to be the paid tributes that families submit through funeral homes that have a relationship with the Flint Democrat or other local newspapers that feed content to WJRT. If you're doing genealogy research or trying to piece together family history, the WJRT page alone won't cut it. I'd recommend cross-referencing with the Flint Sentinel and the Flint Democrat's online archives, which sometimes carry different versions of the same notice. The Funeral Services of Eastpoint and V.J. Freed Funeral Service in Flint are two local funeral homes that frequently submit obituaries to WJRT, and they also post their own versions on their individual websites, which can have additional details like survivor lists and service times that don't make it into the broadcast news version.

One more thing that catches people off guard: the WJRT obituary page doesn't have a robust archive search. If a notice was published six months ago and hasn't been prominently featured, it may have been pushed so far down the page that it's effectively unreachable without knowing the exact date. In those cases, using a search engine with the operator site:wjrt.com followed by the person's name tends to pull up archived or older notices that the site's own search misses. It's a workaround I use regularly, and it's been reliable enough that I keep it in my back pocket. The whole process of tracking down a specific notice through WJRT typically takes me about ten to fifteen minutes if I know roughly when the person died and have a decent spelling of the name. Without those advantages, it can stretch to forty-five minutes or more, especially if the family chose an unusual name spelling or if the person moved into the area recently and isn't well-documented in local paper archives. There are limitations worth noting upfront. WJRT only covers the Mid Michigan market, so if the person died in Detroit, Grand Rapids, or Saginaw, their notice likely won't appear here. The coverage area is roughly the Flint metropolitan area and the surrounding counties — Genesee, Shiawassee, Tuscola, and parts of Bay and Lapeer. People outside that footprint should look elsewhere, whether that's MLive for Greater Detroit coverage or Bridge Michigan for statewide notices.

Also, the obituaries on WJRT's site aren't indexed the same way a dedicated memorial platform would be. You won't find guest books, photo galleries, or the kind of memorial features that sites like Legacy.com offer. What you get is functional — a notice, maybe a photo, and contact information for the funeral home. That's it. If you need more detail, the funeral home's own website is your next stop.