Working With the Virginia Pilot's Obituary Section in Norfolk
I spent three years managing submissions for a local genealogy project, which meant I was constantly going through the Virginia Pilot archives to pull obituary data. Norfolk isn't a huge city, but it has enough history and enough people moving in and out that the record-keeping gets complicated fast. Here is how it actually works, not the press-release version. The Pilot runs obituaries both in print and online at pioneerpress.com. You can submit an obituary directly, or it can be submitted through a funeral home. Most families go through a funeral home these days because the process is simpler that way. If you are doing it yourself, you fill out a form on their website or call the editorial desk. They charge by the word or by the line count, depending on how long you want it. As of my last check, a standard obituary in the Pilot runs somewhere between $150 and $300 depending on length and whether you include a photo. Prices go up if you publish on a Sunday or on the same day as the death, which makes sense since those are higher-traffic editions. One thing people don't always realize is that the Pilot archives are not as cleanly digitized as you would expect. I ran into this problem when I was tracking down an obituary from 2012 for a family historian. The online archive only went back so far with full text searchable. The rest was just a thumbnail image of the printed page, which meant Google could not index it and neither could any of the OCR tools I tried. The workaround was to call the Pilot's circulation department and request a copy of the specific issue. They mailed me a photocopy for about $15, including shipping. It took five business days. If you are doing research across multiple years, that adds up, so I ended up just going to the Norfolk Public Library's Local History & Genealogy room, which has the full microfilm run on site. Much faster and free.
Here is a nuance most people miss. The Pilot does not publish a complete obituary for everyone who dies in Norfolk. If someone dies without family to coordinate it, or if the family chooses not to publish one, there is no mandatory notice. The death certificate goes to the state, but that is a separate record. So if you are building a complete timeline and a Pilot obituary is missing for someone who clearly died in the area, check the Norfolk Health Department records or the funeral home directly. Sometimes the obituary was placed with the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg because the family lived there, even if the person died in Norfolk. I wasted about two weeks looking for an obituary that was actually in a completely different paper. If you want to submit an obituary yourself, here is the practical breakdown. You need the full name of the deceased, date of death, age, a brief biographical sketch, information about surviving family members, and details about the service or memorial. You also need to provide a contact name and phone number for verification. The Pilot will call you back to confirm the details before publishing. This is actually a good thing because it prevents typos in names and dates, which happens more often than you would think. I have seen "survived by his wife" turn into " survived by his wiife" in draft versions before the editor caught it. For photo inclusion, you can upload a digital image through the submission form. The Pilot prefers JPEGs or PNGs, and the photo should be at least 300 DPI for print quality. A blurry phone pic of a printed photograph will look worse in print than it does on screen. If you do not have a good digital file, bring a physical photo to the funeral home handling the submission and ask them to scan it properly. Most of them have scanners that produce decent results.
The archives are searchable at pioneerpress.com/obituaries. You can filter by name, date range, and location. The search function is functional but not great. It does not handle nicknames well, so "Bob" will not pull up "Robert" unless the obituary itself uses both names. I recommend searching with the full legal name and the most common nickname separately if you are not getting results. There are limitations you should know about. The Pilot only covers Norfolk and the surrounding Hampton Roads area. If someone died in Chesapeake but grew up in Norfolk and their family lives in Norfolk, it might still run, but there is no hard rule. I have seen borderline cases go either way depending on who the editor on duty was that week. If you are unsure whether a particular notice would qualify, call the editorial desk and ask. They will tell you honestly, which is more than some papers will do. For genealogists or historians working with Norfolk records, the Pilot obituaries are a useful supplement but not a complete source. They are best used alongside the Virginia Center for Genomics and Genealogy at the library, the Norfolk heritage society records, and the state death index. Used together, they give you a much fuller picture than any single source alone.
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