How To Research Hunts Funeral Home Obituaries Without Losing Your Mind
I spent three years digging through funeral home records for a genealogy project. Hunts Funeral Home is one of those places that has been operating in the area since the early 1900s, and their archives are a mixed bag. Some records are meticulously kept. Most are not. Here is what actually works when you are trying to trace obituaries from their files. The first thing you need to understand is that Hunts Funeral Home does not have a centralized digital database. Their records are split between physical boxes in their office basement, a microfilm collection at the county courthouse, and scattered digital files that go back to about 1998. If you show up expecting an online search portal, you will waste half a day before you figure out where to actually look.
Unveiling The Stories Behind The Obituaries A Deep Dive Into Hunts Funeral Home Records
Start with the physical archive. I made the mistake of calling ahead, which saved me about four hours. The person who answers the phone on weekdays between 9 and 4 is usually Sandra or Margie. They know where everything is because they have been there since the nineties. Ask them directly about pre-1960 records, because those are stored in a different room than the modern files. They will tell you which box numbers cover your time range. The box system is not intuitive. Hunts labels boxes by year ranges, but they also have separate collections for military veterans, infants, and non-residents. I pulled a box labeled 1952-1954 and found obituaries from 1951 squeezed into the back. The labeling is inconsistent because the funeral home changed ownership twice in the eighties and neither transition included a proper records audit. Expect to cross-reference dates manually. For the digital records, the website has a basic obituary search, but it only covers from 2003 onward. The search function is broken for any name longer than two words. I found a workaround by searching the county cemetery database instead, which pulls from the same source material. The cemetery system lets you filter by death date and funeral home, which gets you most of what you need without fighting the broken search bar.
Here is something people miss. The obituary itself is only half the story. Hunts maintains a separate file called the "placement card" system. These are small index cards filed alphabetically by last name that contain the burial location, next of kin, minister information, and sometimes a handwritten note about the family's preferences. The placement cards are more detailed than the published obituaries in almost every case. I used to skip them because I thought they were duplicates. That was a mistake. The placement card for a 1967 burial had the address of the family home, which the obituary never mentioned. That address turned out to be the key to finding the right property records for a whole branch of the family tree. The microfilm at the county courthouse is another layer most people ignore. Hunts partners with the local newspaper to send copies of every obituary they publish. That newspaper file goes back to 1941 and is filmed monthly. The microfilm reader at the courthouse is from 1987 and prints at a resolution that makes fine print illegible, but the dates and full names are usually readable. I spend about forty-five minutes per session scanning for the names I need. The alternative is driving to Hunts and sitting through their slower process, which takes about two hours including parking and waiting. One edge case that cost me a week. There was a stretch from 1974 to 1976 where the funeral home stopped filing placement cards due to a staff shortage. I kept hitting dead ends until I checked the newspaper clippings against the church records. The Third Baptist Church keeps its own register of services, and their ledger from that period had the missing entries. Cross-referencing church records with the newspaper clippings filled the gap. If you hit a three-year hole in the Hunts files, check the local churches directly. They are not always cooperative, but they usually comply if you bring a signed release form from the family.
Get the Full Details
There are downsides to this research method. The biggest one is that Hunts charges fifteen dollars per hour for staff time when you request a physical search. If you just pull the boxes yourself during visiting hours, it is free, but you only get two hours before they ask you to leave. The digital system occasionally drops search results. I have noticed that names with hyphens or apostrophes do not always return matches. You have to try variations manually. The placement cards are handwritten in cursive that gets worse over time. A card from 1982 is readable. A card from 1991 is a guess. The best approach is to start with the digital search to confirm names and dates, pull the physical boxes for the placement cards on the same day, and then verify anything before 1970 against the courthouse microfilm. This sequence cuts my average research time from six hours down to about two. If you are dealing with post-2003 records only, the website search plus a quick call to Sandra or Margie for the placement card numbers will get you there in under an hour. The records are there. They are just not organized the way modern researchers expect them to be. Patience and the right entry point make the difference between a weekend project and a months-long frustration.
