Working With Lawrence E Moon Funeral Home Records
I spent about three hours last Tuesday tracking down a 1987 obituary for my grandmother's cousin through Lawrence E Moon Funeral Home in Pontiac. The online archive is functional but incomplete, and if you don't know what you're doing you'll waste an afternoon staring at broken date filters. Here's how the process actually works. The site uses a legacy search interface that splits results by date ranges in 30-day increments. You can search by name, date of death, or funeral service date, but the wildcard matching on surnames is aggressive enough that "Smith" will pull every variation including Smyth, Smythe, and occasionally unrelated entries that got tagged incorrectly during data migration. I ran into this exact problem when researching the Mitchell line. The workaround was to search the date range first, then manually scan through. It takes longer upfront but saves you from sifting through forty irrelevant results later. The obituaries themselves vary in quality. Some are full-length newspaper submissions with detailed biographical sketches. Others are minimal templates that just list surviving family members and service times. The funeral home's own website pulls from two sources: their internal case management system and the Oakland Press digital archive. When entries are missing from one source, they sometimes appear in the other, so cross-referencing both is worth the extra ten minutes.
Practical Limitations You Should Know About
The biggest bottleneck is that Lawrence E Moon only maintains detailed digital records going back to roughly 1995. Before that, most materials exist only on microfilm or in physical card files at their office on East 10 Mile Road. I called their main line expecting to request a pre-1995 record over the phone. The staff member I spoke with said those requests have to go in writing with a notarized statement of relationship to the deceased. They won't even look up a name without that paperwork, which is stricter than most funeral homes in the area and probably stems from a privacy policy shift after some family disputes in the late 90s. Another thing that trips people up: the online obituaries sometimes carry outdated contact information. The phone numbers listed for surviving family members are current at time of publication but change over years. If you're trying to reconnect with distant relatives for genealogy research, don't rely on those numbers. Use the obituary content itself to identify names, then cross-reference with county records or the Michigan State Archives for more stable information.
What to Do When the Site Won't Load a Record
Occasionally you'll hit an obituary page that shows the title and death date but the body text is blank. This happens about once every twenty records I'd estimate. The funeral home's web developer apparently migrated the database in 2019 and some older formatting broke during the transfer. When this occurs, try accessing the original Oakland Press clipping through their archive directly. The URL structure is predictable: you just need to swap out the domain for the Press's obituary section and adjust the date parameters. It took me about five minutes to find a blank entry that way instead of spending an hour on the phone with the funeral home. The staff at Lawrence E Moon are generally helpful if you have a legitimate reason for requesting records, but they're not IT support. Calling about website errors won't get you anywhere fast. Your best bet is to document the issue, note the specific name and date, and email it to their administrative address. They tend to respond within two to three business days with either a fix or an explanation of why the record can't be recovered.
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A Few Things Beginners Miss
The search function doesn't handle middle names or initials well. If your ancestor went by a middle name in life but it wasn't included in the obituary, a direct name search will miss them. I learned this the hard way with my great-uncle Robert James Peterson, who was listed as Bob Peterson in his obituary. Searching "Robert" returned nothing relevant. Searching "Bob" found it immediately. Always try phonetic variations and common nicknames if your initial search comes up empty. Also, the site indexes service dates separately from death dates. Some people enter the wrong one when they're submitting obituaries, especially for visitations that happen days before the actual death. If a search by date of death returns zero results, try searching by service date instead and work backward from there. The difference is usually small but it's enough to break the filter entirely.
