Wausau Daily Herald Obituaries Honoring Lives Preserving Community Memory

Reading Wausau Daily Herald Obituaries: A Practical Guide

The Wausau Daily Herald publishes obituaries every day, and they are one of those places where you can actually trace a family across decades if you know how to look. Most people just skim the front page listings and move on. The real value is in the digital archive and the older print runs, but navigating them takes some effort. I have spent years digging through these for genealogy work and local history research, so here is how it actually works. The obituary section serves the Marathon County area and surrounding communities in central Wisconsin. When someone passes, families typically submit notices through funeral homes or directly to the paper. There is a submission process, a deadline, and a cost involved. Standard obituaries run anywhere from $150 to $400 depending on length and whether you include a photograph. Extended or featured death notices cost more. The paper does not publish every death — only those for which someone has paid and submitted copy. That means gaps exist, especially for older records before digitization. On their website, current obituaries are posted within a day or two of the funeral home filing them. You can search by name, date range, or keyword. The search function is functional but basic. It indexes the full text of the obituary, so variations in spelling or nickname usage can cause you to miss results. If you are looking for someone who went by a middle name informally, try searching both the formal and informal versions separately.

One practical issue I ran into recently involved a man named Gerald Thomsen who died in late 2023. His family listed him as "Jerry" in the obituary text but filed it under his legal name Gerald. The search algorithm did not cross-reference them, so a straight name search for Jerry returned nothing useful. I ended up finding the notice by browsing the death index by date rather than searching by name. Going forward, when I need to locate older notices, I always cross-reference the date of death from the Wisconsin Death Index or funeral home records first, then pull the obituary from that day's archive. It cuts the search time significantly. The digital archive goes back roughly fifteen years. Before that, you are dealing with microfilm or physical newspaper copies held at the Downtown Wausau Public Library on Clark Street. The library staff is helpful but understaffed, so do not expect them to pull materials for you without some waiting. Bring your own card catalog numbers if you have them, or arrive with specific date ranges ready. I usually request a week's worth of obituaries at a time from the microfilm reader, which takes about twenty minutes per week of paper. There are things the digital archive does not do well. Full-text search on older notices is spotty because the OCR quality varies. Some names come through as garbage characters, especially from handwritten submission forms that were typed up by staff. If you hit a wall with the online search, try browsing page by page around the death date. It is slower but more reliable for anything older than about eight years.

Another thing people overlook is the connection between obituaries and the funeral home websites. Most local families use either Schmitz Funeral Home, Ladd Funeral Home, or Kienast Funeral Home. Each of these posts the obituary on their own site, often with additional details like survivor lists, service times, and sometimes scanned photos that do not make it into the newspaper version. Cross-referencing the funeral home page with the Herald notice can fill in gaps, particularly missing dates or locations of services. If you are doing serious genealogy work, the obituaries are useful but incomplete. They confirm deaths, list surviving relatives, and sometimes mention military service or organizational memberships. They rarely include birth dates for the deceased or parents unless the family specifically includes them. For birth and death dates, you are better off using the Wisconsin Vital Records system or Ancestry.com, then using the Herald obituary to verify the details and find living relatives. There is also a cemetery records angle. The Herald occasionally publishes burial information, but not consistently. When they do, it is usually the cemetery name and section. If you need the exact grave location, you are better off checking with the individual cemetery offices directly. Wausau area cemeteries like Forest Home and Lakewood have their own record-keeping systems that are often more detailed than what appears in print.

For anyone just trying to find a recent obituary for a relative or neighbor, the website is sufficient. Search by name, narrow the date range, and you will usually find it within a minute or two. The interface is not the best, but it gets the job done. If you need older records or are researching a family line, budget more time and be prepared to dig through multiple sources. The paper is a solid starting point, but it is not the end point.