Reading and Submitting Obituaries Through the Valley Courier
The Valley Courier runs memorial announcements every week, and if you are trying to submit one or just make sense of what they publish, there are some practical details most people never figure out without asking around. The process is straightforward until it isn't, which is why I wrote this down. These aren't paid advertisements. They are memorial announcements prepared by families and local newspapers to honor someone who has died and to document that person's life for anyone who might look them up years later. That second part matters more than people realize. A well-written obituary from the Valley Courier becomes a primary source document for genealogists, local historians, and family researchers. I have seen people track down third cousins through names buried in twenty-year-old announcements. The submission process starts with contacting the editorial office. You can call or email, but calling during business hours on a weekday is faster. They will ask for the full name of the deceased, the date of death, surviving family members, service details, and a brief biographical sketch. The standard length for a free announcement is roughly two hundred to three hundred words. Anything longer gets charged at their per-line rate, which is nowhere near cheap. I recommend writing your draft to exactly two hundred fifty words before you send it in. That gets you in the free window and leaves room for minor edits.
One thing that trips people up is the difference between an obituary and a death notice. An obituary includes a narrative life summary. A death notice is just the bare facts: name, age, date of death, and survivors. The Courier accepts both, but they place them in different sections of the paper. Obituaries run in the main local news section. Death notices appear in a separate column. If you want the person's story actually read rather than just recorded, you submit an obituary. If budget is tight, a death notice is cheaper and still gets published. Turnaround time is typically two to four business days from submission to print. If the death happened over a weekend and you submit on Monday, you are looking at a Thursday or Friday publication date. There is no rush fee option at the Courier. Some other papers offer expedited placement for extra cost, but not this one. Plan accordingly. The biggest mistake families make is waiting until Friday to submit when the next available print slot is the following Wednesday, which means the announcement doesn't appear until the family has already held the service. I ran into a specific problem once that illustrates why the timing details matter. A family submitted an obituary on a Tuesday evening for their father, who had passed on a Sunday. They expected it in the Wednesday paper. It wasn't there. The issue was that the Courier uses a weekly layout cycle that locks submissions by Wednesday afternoon for the Thursday edition. Tuesday evening submission was too late because the layout editor had already moved past that day's batch. I told the family to email the editor directly the next morning with a subject line that included the word urgent and the deceased's full name. The editor pulled the file and squeezed it into the Friday edition. That workaround worked because individual editors at smaller papers have the authority to break the normal rotation schedule when contacted directly. This is not something that works every time, and you should never rely on it, but it helped that week.
When it comes to the actual content, the best obituaries include one specific detail that makes them searchable and memorable. I am talking about a middle name, a nickname, a former employer, a military branch and rank, or a specific organization the person belonged to. Most death databases index by first and last name only. Adding a middle initial or known nickname can mean the difference between someone finding your relative's record or hitting a dead end. The Courier does not require this, but I always tell families to include at least one identifying detail beyond the basic name. There are also some limitations worth being honest about. The Valley Courier's online archive only goes back about ten years. Anything older than that sits in the physical paper collection and would need to be requested through the local library or county historical society. If you are researching a death that occurred in 2008 or earlier, you cannot look it up on the website. You have to go in person or call the archives. This is a real bottleneck for anyone doing deep genealogy work in the area. Another limitation is that the Courier does not accept obituaries for people who did not live in their circulation area. There have been repeated requests to include passing residents of adjacent towns, but the policy holds firm at this point. If the person's address falls outside the delivery zone, the submission gets returned without exception. For families submitting today, here is what actually works in practice. Draft the obituary first. Get approval from at least one other family member on the wording. Call the editorial office during business hours to confirm word count and any current formatting requirements. Submit the text via email and follow up with a phone call the next business day to confirm receipt. If you do not get a confirmation within forty-eight hours, call again. The office is small and emails occasionally drop through cracks.
Get the Full Details
If the Valley Courier is not the right fit because of location or archive limitations, the county sheriff's coroner records and the state vital statistics office maintain death records that are publicly accessible after a waiting period. These are purely factual records with no narrative content, but they fill the gaps that newspaper obituaries leave behind. Most researchers end up using both sources together.
