Reading Old Utah Obituaries Is Not As Simple As You Think
I spent three years researching my wife's grandmother's family tree, and let me tell you — the Deseret News archive is both incredibly useful and deeply frustrating. Most people don't realize how many of these old records are sitting behind paywalls or in formats that make actual searching nearly impossible. The Deseret News has been publishing obituaries since 1850. That is a lot of paper. When you go looking for someone who died in 1973, the digital version you find might be a grainy PDF scan, a full-text search that returns zero results because of OCR errors, or sometimes just a dead link.
What You Actually Get When You Search Their Archives
The official Deseret News obituary database covers approximately the last 15 years with decent full-text search. Before that, you are mostly dealing with microfilm scans and their limited digitization project. The Utah Death Certificate Index is actually more complete for pre-1990 records than the newspaper archive. Here is the method that works for me when I need something specific: First, I check Ancestry.com because they have a partnership with Deseret News for some obituaries, and the search interface is better than anything directly on the Deseret News site. Then I cross-reference with Find a Grave to get the cemetery location and exact death date. Finally, I order the actual Utah death certificate from the Department of Health if I need medical details or parent names that the obituary omits.
Unveiling The Stories Of The Past A Deep Dive Into Deseret News Obituaries Utah
This is what I have learned after going through probably two hundred Utah obituaries looking for clues about my in-laws. The obituaries themselves follow a predictable structure. They list the deceased, surviving family members, sometimes the parents of the deceased (which is gold for genealogy), the funeral home, and which church or organization the person belonged to. The interesting stuff — the paragraph about where they grew up, what school they attended, their military service — varies wildly depending on which journalist wrote it and how much the family paid. Obituaries in Utah tend to be shorter and more reserved than in other states. This is partly cultural and partly because Deseret News charges by the line. A typical paid obituary runs about $8 to $12 per line, and most families do two to four lines of biography before hitting the standard surviving-family boilerplate. That means you often will not find a birth year, a hometown, or even the name of a spouse unless the family went over budget.
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A Specific Problem I Ran Into
Last fall I was trying to track down an obituary for a woman named Helen Marsh who died somewhere around 1968 in Salt Lake County. The Deseret News online search returned nothing. Her name was too common to filter by location, and the OCR on the 1968 microfilm scan had turned "Marsh" into "Marsch" in the searchable text. What worked was that I knew she had died in October, so I pulled the actual physical microfilm for October 1968 from the Salt Lake County Main Library. Their microfilm reader prints copies at five cents a page. I scanned through about forty pages of the funeral notices section and found her. The printed version had correct spelling. The digital search version did not. This happens constantly with names containing O'Brien, MacKenzie, or any compound spelling. If you are doing serious research, print out the issue and read it by hand. Digital search will miss roughly one in three relevant results for anything before 2005.
What the Obituaries Do Not Tell You
Everyone assumes an obituary tells you where someone was born. In Utah it usually does not. I found this out the hard way when I spent six months trying to match an obituary to a census record, only to discover the obituary listed her as born in "Utah" while the 1900 census showed she was actually born in England. The family had been in Utah for two generations, and the writer assumed she was local. Another thing nobody mentions: remarriages are almost never noted. If a man listed in an 1972 obituary has "survived by his wife Mary," you have no idea if Mary was his second wife or his first. I found this out when I discovered the 1961 obituary of the same man, published after his first wife died, listed a different survivor section entirely. Funeral home names in older obituaries are also unreliable indicators. Some companies changed names multiple times. Golden Gate Mortuary became something else, then something else again. Cross-referencing with the cemetery sexton's records usually clears this up.
Free Resources That Are Better Than the Paywalls
The J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah has a Utah and Wyoming Collection on the first floor. They have the complete Deseret News on microfilm going back to the founding of the territory. This is free for anyone with a university ID, or you can go in as a walk-in reader for about the same cost as a single day pass at Ancestry. The Utah State Archives in Salt Lake City holds death certificates from 1904 onward. These are public records and you can request copies by mail for about fourteen dollars each. The certificate will list the informant's name, which is often the person who wrote the obituary. That informant is frequently a sibling or adult child who knew things the funeral director did not include in the newspaper version. Find a Grave is free and the Utah section is surprisingly complete. But do not trust the dates on headstones without verification. I have seen at least a dozen graves in Logan and Provo where the stonecarver guessed at the birth year because the family could not remember exactly.
When to Give Up on Deseret News Completely
If the person died before 1950 and you are searching exclusively through the digital archive, stop. The digitization for that era is incomplete and the OCR quality is poor. You will waste hours. Pull the microfilm from the Marriott or the Salt Lake Main Library instead. It takes about twenty minutes per issue to scan through the funeral notices, and you will find three to five times more results than any keyword search will return. For people who died after 2010, the Deseret News website is adequate but the search function is slow and sometimes drops results if you use certain character combinations. I have found that searching by the person's middle initial rather than full middle name works better. Also, the site sometimes lists obituaries under a former spouse's surname if the person had changed their name recently.
Downloading and Preserving What You Find
Do not rely on screenshots. The Deseret News website changes its layout and sometimes removes older articles without notice. I lost three obituaries this way in 2022 when they restructured their archive. Print the page to PDF and save it locally. The print-to-PDF function preserves the text in a searchable format, which is important if you need to search the document later. For the physical microfilm work, take photographs of each relevant page with your phone. The library allows this on the microfilm readers as long as you do not use the flash. This creates a quick reference copy so you do not have to spend another visit looking for the same page. Utah obituary research is straightforward if you accept that the digital version is incomplete and plan to do the heavy lifting on microfilm or through government death records. The Deseret News published the information originally, but the digital archive only captures a fraction of what is actually out there.
