Reading Obituaries Like Someone Who Actually Cares
Most people treat obituaries like a formality. They skim the dates, note the surviving family, and move on. But if you actually sit down and read them carefully, they become something else entirely. Local obits in places like Asheboro, NC are packed with details that tell you more about the community than any city brochure ever could. The trick is knowing what to look for. Start with the basics. An obituary in Randolph County usually follows a standard format, but the real content hides in the specifics. Organization name. The person's employer. The churches they attended. These aren't filler. They're the actual map of someone's life. I remember going through some microfilm at the Asheboro Public Library a few years back, trying to piece together a family history for someone. The digital records only went back to about 2005, but the paper versions on those old rolls went much further. Found a bunch of obits from the 1970s that completely changed the picture. The person listed as the deceased in one obit was actually the same person listed as a surviving sibling in another. Old hand-typed submissions sometimes had errors. Cross-referencing between different papers in the county saved me from building my whole research on a typo.
The workaround is straightforward. Don't rely on a single source. The Asheboro Review had one version. The Raleigh papers sometimes picked up the same obit with edits. The church bulletins sometimes listed completely different surviving family members. When the details didn't line up, I'd call the funeral home listed and ask. Most of them would verify what they had on file within five minutes. Phone numbers are still printed in the front section of local papers. Here's something beginners consistently miss. The military honors section. A lot of Asheboro-area obits mention Veterans Affairs benefits or American Legion posts. That's useful beyond just respecting service. The branch of service, the years, the discharge status, it's all right there. It opens up another whole set of records. Fold3, Ancestry military collections, even the National Archives. A single obit can point you toward three or four different document sets you'd otherwise never find. Another thing nobody talks about is the cemetery notation. The lot number and section are often included at the end. This matters because Randolph County has multiple graveyards, some older than the town itself. Finding the exact plot lets you locate burial records, which sometimes list parents or spouses not mentioned in the obit. The county register of deeds office keeps some of that stuff. Others went missing during the courthouse renovations a decade ago. Not everything survived.
If you're looking for older material, the library's genealogy room has the local newspaper archives on microfilm. It's not digitized as fast as you'd think. A lot of folks assume everything's online now. It isn't. The 1980s and earlier are mostly still on film. Bring your own glasses if you wear them. The microfilm readers are fine but they don't adjust for prescription. Don't overlook the funeral home websites. Some of the smaller ones in the area have been posting full obituaries online since the early 2000s. They're searchable by last name. You can usually find birth dates, service times, and who arranged the services. This is helpful when the newspaper version got edited down for space. Funeral directors tend to keep the longer versions. There are limits. A lot of obituaries from before 1990 are incomplete or missing entirely. Some families chose to skip them altogether. The practice of publishing obits became much more common after the 1980s. Before that, death notices were sparse and brief. If you're researching someone who died in the 1960s or earlier, don't assume the obit exists. Check the church records. Check the county health department files. Check the cemetery association minutes. They might have something the papers didn't.
Get the Full Details
Also worth noting: not every source is reliable. Some online genealogy sites have uploaded scanned obituaries with OCR errors that flip letters. An "S" becomes a "5." A "B" becomes an "8." Always verify against the original image if you can. The microfilm or the actual paper is your ground truth. Everything else is a copy of a copy. The process takes time but it's not complicated. Find the obit. Read past the basic info. Note the organizations, churches, employers. Check multiple sources for the same person. Look up the cemetery listing. Call the funeral home if something seems off. Follow the military detail if there is one. That's it. No special software. No expensive subscriptions. Just patience and a willingness to read slowly. I've found that most people give up too early. They run a name through a search engine, get three mediocre results, and stop. The good stuff is deeper. It's in the cross-references and the contradictions and the details that don't immediately make sense. Those are the parts that actually tell you who someone was.
