Finding Old Records at Redmon Funeral Home in Stow
Most people hit a wall pretty quickly when they try to dig through obituaries at Redmon Funeral Home in Stow, Ohio. The online portal is decent for recent deaths, but anything past roughly five years gets harder to track down. I spent about three weeks last fall trying to pull records for a great-uncle who passed in 2016, and let me tell you — the digital trail goes cold fast. Here's the straightforward path that actually works, based on what I've learned through trial and error. Start with their website. Redmon Funeral Home maintains an online obituary section, and it's organized by date and name. You can search by last name, which helps if you know who you're looking for. For records from the last five years or so, this usually gets you what you need. The obituaries typically include the person's full name, dates, surviving family members, service details, and sometimes a brief bio or photo. Nothing fancy, but it's reliable.
Where people run into trouble is going further back. Redmon doesn't digitize everything, and there's no public database you can query for pre-2019 records. I tried using Google with various combinations of the person's name plus "Redmon Funeral Home Stow" — sometimes results show up if the obituary was syndicated to other sites like Legacy.com or local newspapers. But that only works if the family or the funeral home chose to publish it elsewhere. A lot of times, they don't. The workaround I ended up using was calling the funeral home directly. Their main number is listed on their site. I asked for their records department or whoever handles archival materials. The staff was helpful, though they could only look things up in real time — they don't do deep research over the phone. They told me that records from before 2015 are stored physically and accessing them requires an in-person visit or a formal request. That's when I drove up from Cleveland, which took about an hour and forty-five minutes. At the location, I filled out a simple request form. They let me review the physical files in a back office, which took maybe twenty minutes. I got copies of two obituaries and a death certificate reference. The whole process from start to finish — call, drive, wait, review — took about three hours. Not terrible, but it's a commitment if you're doing this for multiple names.
One thing nobody mentions: Akron-based newspapers often carried Redmon obituaries. The Akron Beacon Journal had a section for funeral notices, and they archived them. You can access some of those through the library system or paid archive sites. I found an obituary through the Summit County Public Library's digital archive that wasn't on Redmon's website at all. That saved me from making a third trip. Another angle worth considering is the Ohio Department of Health's death records. If you need official documentation rather than just the obituary text, you can request those through their Vital Records section. It costs around twenty-five dollars per copy and takes a few weeks to process. Not ideal for casual research, but necessary if you're building a family tree or dealing with estate matters. The biggest mistake I see people make is assuming everything is online now. It isn't. Small regional funeral homes like Redmon operate on a hybrid model — modern website for current notices, paper files for older ones. There's no central registry, no searchable national database, and no API you can query. If you want something from ten or fifteen years ago, you're going to have to put in some legwork. Call first, check newspaper archives, and if those don't pan out, plan a visit. That's the realistic picture.
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