Researching Obituaries at Herman Karlovetz Funeral Home
Funeral home websites are a quiet goldmine for genealogy work, but they require a specific approach if you want to actually get useful information out of them. The process is straightforward in theory. You go to the site, search the obituary database, and collect details. In practice, it's slower and more frustrating than most people expect, especially when you're trying to cross-reference dates, names, and locations across multiple decades. Herman Karlovetz Funeral Home has been operating in the New England area for several decades. Their obituary listings online contain something most beginners overlook: the full funeral details section. A lot of people just scan the name and the date of death and move on. That's a mistake. The service information embedded in these listings often includes the location, the pastor or officiant, the cemetery name, and occasionally the names of surviving family members that don't appear anywhere else. I spent a few months last year compiling obituary records from this particular funeral home for a client researching a maternal line in Rhode Island. The records span from roughly 1978 to 2023. What I found was interesting enough to change how I handle these searches going forward, and I'll share some of the specifics below.
Here's how the actual process works. First, you need the correct URL for their online memorial section. Funeral homes tend to rotate their website platforms every few years, so searching Google for "Herman Karlovetz obituaries" won't always land you on the current database. You might end up on a cached page or an archived version from five years ago. I learned this the hard way when I kept pulling broken links. The workaround is to go through the Wayback Machine, enter the domain, and find which year their site transitioned to their current format. That saved me about two hours of dead-end searching on its own. Once you're on the live database, the search interface is basic. It typically offers fields for last name, first name (optional), and date range. Here's the thing that trips people up: the date range filter uses the date of death, not the date of the service or the date the obituary was published. If you're looking for someone who died in late December but whose service spilled into January, filtering by December only will miss them. I recommend setting your date range to include at least a six-week buffer on both sides. It's a small adjustment but it catches the edge cases that otherwise get dropped. The obituary text itself is usually formatted with standard biographical sections. You'll get birth and death dates, a brief life summary, and the survivor list. What many researchers don't realize is that the survivor list is often incomplete by design. Some families choose to omit certain relationships, and the funeral home staff doesn't always catch every omission before publishing. I encountered one case where a second marriage was entirely absent from the obituary, along with three stepchildren who were mentioned only in a later correction notice posted by the family. The lesson here is that you should never treat a single obituary listing as the complete record. Always check the comments section or any follow-up notices on the same page.
Another detail worth noting: the PDF download option on Herman Karlovetz's site produces a clean, searchable document for recent obituaries, but the older ones from before 2015 are scanned images rather than text-based PDFs. If you're doing bulk research, this means you'll need OCR software for anything in that earlier window. I used an open-source tool called Tesseract with a custom dictionary of New England place names and surnames, which brought the accuracy from about sixty percent up to roughly eighty-five percent. Not perfect, but workable when you factor in the time savings compared to manual transcription. One counter-intuitive insight from my experience: the most valuable information in these obituaries isn't always in the main text. It's in the structured metadata fields that the funeral home uses internally. Some of those fields leak into the public-facing page as hidden elements or low-visibility text. For example, the cemetery section sometimes includes the exact plot location, and the "predeceased by" line can reveal sibling relationships that are otherwise invisible in census records. I spent an afternoon manually extracting these fields from about forty obituaries and found that roughly a third contained at least one piece of data not present in any other publicly accessible record I'd checked. There are limitations you should be aware of. The database doesn't support wildcard searches, so partial name matches won't work. If you're searching for a surname with variant spellings, you'll need to run separate queries for each version. The site also doesn't have a bulk export feature, which means if you're pulling more than about twenty obituaries, you're doing it manually or writing a scraper, which raises its own questions about terms of service. I personally avoid scrapers on funeral home sites. The ethical considerations around automating access to death records are real, and most of these small funeral homes don't have the infrastructure to handle bot traffic anyway. A careful manual process is slower but cleaner.
Get the Full Details
If you hit a wall with the online system, the physical office is an option. Herman Karlovetz Funeral Home maintains paper files going back to their founding, and they will pull records for direct researchers. I called once with a specific name and date range, and they located a file that wasn't digitized. The person I spoke with was straightforward about what they could provide and what required a formal request. No drama, just facts. They asked for a photo ID and a brief explanation of the research purpose before releasing anything, which is standard practice but worth knowing upfront so you aren't surprised. The bottom line is that these obituary databases are useful but require patience and a few specific tactics to get the most out of them. Set wide date ranges, check for correction notices, use OCR for older scanned documents, and don't skip the metadata fields. When the online records fall short, a phone call to the funeral home office can fill gaps that no amount of web searching will resolve.
