Finding Your Way Through Mays Funeral Home Obits in Augusta
I spent about three years helping people trace family roots through obituary archives in Georgia. Augusta comes up a lot because it has one of those towns where a single funeral home handled services for entire generations of the same families. Mays Funeral Home is one of them. You read their obituaries and you start seeing the same last names repeat across decades, which tells you something about continuity in a place most outsiders don't really understand. The obituary section on their website is where most people start. It's not the most polished site you'll find, but the content itself is solid. They publish full obituaries with service details, not just basic survival announcements. You'll get birth dates, surviving family members, funeral time, and the cemetery where interment happens. That matters when you're doing genealogy work because most online databases have gaps in the burial location field. What separates them from some of the bigger chains in the area is that their staff actually writes these. I've noticed patterns where the obituaries include specific church names, veteran service details, and sometimes even the names of the pallbearers. That level of detail doesn't come from a template. It comes from someone sitting down with the family and recording what they want included.
Here's the thing most people miss when they're searching these records. Mays has been operating in Augusta for roughly eighty years now. Their earlier records from the 1950s through the 1980s aren't fully digitized. If you're looking for an obituary from before 1995, the website won't have it. I ran into this exact problem last October when a client needed the obituary for her grandfather who died in 1978. I called the main office directly and asked about their archive process. They told me they keep physical copies in a basement file system and that requesting a copy takes about two weeks. I suggested she send a written request with the deceased person's full name, approximate date of death, and her relationship to the deceased. That worked. She received a scanned copy within fourteen days. Their online presence also includes partnerships with platforms like Legacy.com where some obituaries get cross-posted. Those copies sometimes include photo galleries that the home website doesn't carry. If the direct search on their site turns up nothing recent, check Legacy.com as a secondary source. I've found about a third of the older obituaries that way. There are limitations worth knowing. Their website doesn't have a searchable database. You can't filter by date range or last name efficiently. You scroll. A lot. If you're researching multiple family members, this becomes tedious fast. Another issue is that some obituaries from 2020 to 2022 have missing details because services were modified during the pandemic and the published text reflects those changes inconsistently. I've seen entries where the burial time was listed but the visitation schedule was absent, and vice versa.
For current purposes, if you need to find an upcoming service, the most reliable method is calling their office during business hours. Their reception staff is genuinely helpful and will look up service information over the phone. I recommend having the full legal name ready, because they cross-reference by that, not by nicknames or middle names. It cuts the wait time significantly. The obituaries themselves serve a function beyond the immediate family. In Augusta's Black community especially, these published notices operate as public records of familial connection. The surviving relatives listed in each obituary often become the key to finding extended family members who have moved away. I've helped people reconnect with second cousins purely by reading the survivor lists in Mays Funeral Home obituaries. It's a quiet kind of genealogy tool that doesn't get enough credit. If you're trying to locate a specific historical obituary and the phone request route isn't working, the Richmond County Clerk of Court office also maintains death records going back well over a century. Those aren't the same as funeral home obituaries, but they contain overlapping information like exact death dates and next of kin that can fill gaps. Combining both sources usually gives you a complete picture within a day or two of research effort.
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