Reading Valley Morning Obituaries: A Practical Guide
The Valley Morning Star has been publishing obituaries for decades, and their online section is one of the more useful regional resources in South Texas. If you are trying to track down information about someone who recently passed, or if you are doing genealogy work in the Rio Grande Valley area, this section can save you a significant amount of time compared to digging through physical archives. Here is how to actually use the obituary section efficiently. The site lives at valleymorningstar.com, and the obituaries are typically accessible from the main navigation or through a direct search. You can look up by name, date range, or even filter by funeral home. I recommend starting with the name search because the date filter on their interface is clunky and often returns zero results unless you have an exact date. The free access model is the main bottleneck. You can read the basic obituary text without paying, but full archives beyond the recent two weeks usually require a Houston Chronicle subscription due to the Tribune publishing partnership. This caught me off guard the first time I tried to access a 2019 obituary for a family research project. I ended up calling the Valley Morning Star newsroom directly and asking a reporter to pull the archived piece for me. That took about twenty minutes of waiting on hold, but they were able to locate it and email me a scan. Sometimes the direct route beats the paywall.
For genealogists, here is something most people miss: the funeral home links embedded in the obituaries. The Valley Morning Star partners with several local funeral homes including Dickey Funeral Home, McGee Funeral Chapel, and others. Each obituary typically lists the funeral home handling arrangements along with contact information. If you are researching a family line and need death certificate details or burial records, calling that funeral home directly often gets you further than waiting for digital archives. I spent three weeks trying to track down a great uncle's burial location through the online obituary section alone, only to get the answer in five minutes by calling McGee Funeral Chapel. They had the interment record on file. The search functionality has limitations you should work around. Boolean operators do not work reliably. Wildcards are inconsistent. The best approach is to search by the person's full name and then manually scan through the results using your browser's page search function. If you are looking for someone who used a nickname or a maiden name, try both variations separately. I learned this the hard way when researching my grandmother's side of the family and kept coming up empty until I searched her maiden name instead of her married name. If you want to submit an obituary or have information added, the process goes through the newspaper's classifieds department rather than a self-service portal. You will need to provide the deceased person's full legal name, dates, surviving family members, and service details. Turnaround time is typically forty-eight to seventy-two hours for publication. Rush requests are possible but not guaranteed, especially during holiday weekends when the staff is thin.
One thing the site does well is the photo inclusion. Many of their obituaries now include high-resolution images of the deceased, which is useful when you are trying to confirm identity across different family records. The photos are user-submitted, so quality varies, but the mere presence of a visual record in the archive is valuable for family history documentation. If you cannot access the full archive through the subscription wall, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in Austin holds microfilm copies of the Valley Morning Star going back to the early 1900s. It is a few hours from the Valley, but for serious genealogy work the microfilm collection is unrestricted and complete. I have used it multiple times for pre-1970 obituaries that simply do not exist digitally anywhere else. The obituary section also occasionally publishes memorial pieces and legacy tributes that go beyond the standard death notice format. These longer-form articles tend to appear on weekends and contain more biographical detail, career information, and community impact descriptions. If you are looking for substantive content about someone's life rather than just the facts of their death, filtering for those weekend features will give you more material to work with.
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For ongoing research, consider setting up a Google alert for the specific person's name combined with "Valley Morning Star obituary." This will notify you if anything new surfaces, which matters because the digital archive is not always comprehensive and some older pieces may have been migrated or lost during platform transitions. I have found a couple of relatives this way after searching directly for months without result.
