Reading and Submitting Obituaries at the Waterville Morning Sentinel
The Waterville Sentinel handles death notices and full obituaries for Kennebec County and the surrounding Mid-Coast area. It's one of those papers that still treats obituaries as something worth setting type for, not just running online and forgetting about. I've spent years watching how these notices get filed, edited, and run, so I'll walk you through what actually happens when you deal with them. There's a difference between a death notice and an obituary in their system, and it matters for both cost and format. A death notice is essentially factual: name, age, date of passing, funeral home, service details, maybe a sentence or two. An obituary is a full narrative piece that can run several hundred words and includes biography, survivors, hobbies, career history, the works. The Sentinel charges differently for each, and the pricing structure has shifted over the years depending on word count and whether you want it in print, online, or both. If you're submitting through their website, you'll go to the Sentinel's obituary submission page and fill out the form. They accept direct submissions from families and from funeral homes. If you're working through a funeral home, they usually handle the submission for you and you won't have to think about it much. If you're doing it yourself, here's the straightforward part: gather the essential facts first. Full name, age at death, city of residence, date and location of passing, surviving family members (spouse, children, grandchildren, siblings if applicable), predeceased relatives, service information including date time and location, and which funeral home is handling arrangements. That covers about ninety percent of what gets published.
The counter-intuitive thing most people miss is that the Sentinel's online version often runs significantly longer than the print version. The paper has column width constraints, so print obituaries get trimmed automatically or edited by the staff. If you want the full story published, you need to be explicit about wanting the online version included, and you should budget accordingly. A decent-length obituary with full biographical detail can easily run a few hundred dollars in combined print and digital placement fees. Don't show up expecting a one-size-fits-all package deal. Here's a specific problem I ran into recently that the submission forms don't warn you about. A family submitted an obituary for someone who had been adopted and raised by two people but was biologically related to another set of parents. The form asked for "surviving family" in a pretty narrow way, and the biological siblings were accidentally left off the initial draft. By the time we caught it, the notice had already been typeset for Thursday's edition. The workaround was straightforward but annoying: I called the Sentinel's obituary desk directly at their main number rather than trying to resubmit through the portal. They were able to pull the live version, insert the correction, and republish within about an hour. The portal system doesn't handle mid-run edits well. Face it, the phone call is faster and more reliable for any changes after submission. Another thing worth noting: the Sentinel sometimes runs shorter community death notices that are almost entirely factual, placed by organizations like the VA or local churches for their members. These follow a different template and move through the pipeline faster. If you're dealing with institutional arrangements rather than a family-directed notice, expect a quicker turnaround but less editorial flexibility on wording.
The timeline for publication is usually next-day if you submit early enough in the business day. Afternoons and weekends tend to push things into the following edition. I've seen urgent requests from out-of-state family members miss the deadline by a few hours because they assumed Saturday evening submissions would make it for Monday. They don't. The newsroom operates on aweekday schedule for obituary processing, and weekend submissions typically land in Wednesday's paper at the earliest. If you want to look up past obituaries, the Sentinel keeps an online archive that's searchable by name and date. It's not the most elegant system, but it works adequately for tracking down records. Some people use it to verify information before writing a new notice, particularly when confirming dates or relationships. The archive goes back several years, though very old notices from the early two thousand era can be spotty depending on when the paper digitized its archives. There are limitations to using the Sentinel for this purpose. The circulation is regional rather than statewide, so if the deceased had family or friends scattered across Maine or beyond, you might want to supplement with a broader platform. Online memorial sites and statewide obituary aggregators can reach audiences that a local paper simply won't touch. The Sentinel is the right call when the community connection is genuine and concentrated in this area. It's the wrong call if you're trying to reach a dispersed network of contacts. I've seen families invest heavily in a full print obituary only to realize afterward that most of the people who wanted to know weren't reading the paper anyway.
Get the Full Details
For submission guidelines and current pricing, you can visit the Waterville Morning Sentinel website directly and navigate to their obituaries section. The contact number for the obituary desk is listed there as well, and that's usually the most efficient way to handle anything beyond a standard submission. Keep your documentation ready, be clear about print versus digital placement, and don't hesitate to call if something needs adjusting after you've already submitted.
