How to Research McNearney Mortuary Obituaries in San Mateo
McNearney Mortuary has been handling funerals in San Mateo since 1907. That means their records go back over a century, and they publish obituaries across a few different platforms. If you are trying to track down information about someone from this area, it takes a bit of navigation. Here is what actually works. The primary starting point is their own website at mcnearneys.com. They maintain an online memorial section where recent obituaries are posted with biographical details, service information, and often a photograph. The site is not particularly well-designed, but the search function does work if you know the person's full name. You can also search by year or by last name. It covers deaths going back roughly ten years on their site. For older records, you need to cross-reference with the San Mateo Daily Journal. McNearney's has a long-standing relationship with that publication, and many obituaries from before 2014 only exist in their archives. The paper's digital archive requires a subscription, but the physical copies are available at the San Mateo Public Library on Charleston Road. I spent an afternoon there looking up a great-uncle who died in 2003, and his obituary was in a microfilm roll. The librarian pulled it in about five minutes. Without that connection, I would have had nothing.
Another route is the San Mateo County Times. They publish their own obituary sections, and while they work with multiple funeral homes, McNearney's submissions do appear there. The formatting tends to be slightly different from what the mortuary posts directly, sometimes with additional details the family included specifically for the newspaper version. Here is something most people miss: McNearney's also files obituaries with the California Death Index, which is accessible through Ancestry.com and FamilySearch. These government records contain the exact date of death, cause of death, survivor information, and sometimes the cemetery location. The entries are often posted within a few weeks of the funeral. This is where you find details that never make it into the public obituary, like the specific hospital or facility where the person passed away. The practical problem I run into repeatedly is that the online memorial pages only keep obituaries for about two years before archiving them. After that, they disappear from the main site and you have to dig through old web cache versions or go to the newspaper archives. I found a workaround using the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org. You enter the person's memorial page URL from McNearney's site, and you can usually pull up a snapshot from anywhere between when it was first published and when it got archived. This has saved me more times than I can count when trying to find a specific service date or surviving family member list.
One thing to keep in mind is that not everyone who goes through McNearney's gets a full obituary. Some families choose simplicity, and the online listing might just be a brief notice with a date and a funeral home reference. If you are looking for detailed life information and only find a one-paragraph mention, check the death index records instead. Those government filings tend to be more comprehensive regardless of what the family publishes. For genealogical research, the most useful obituaries are the ones from the 1970s through the early 2000s. During that period, obituaries were typically longer and included more biographical detail. Modern obituaries tend to be shorter, more formulaic, and focused mostly on service logistics. If you are looking for rich personal history, the older papers are where you will find it.
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