How to Actually Use the Wausau Pilot and Review Obituaries Without Losing Your Mind
The Wausau Pilot and Review runs one of those obituary sections most mid-sized Wisconsin papers have. It covers Marathon County and the surrounding towns, which means it picks up people from Wausau itself, Rothschild, Schofield, Princeton, and places further out like Plover and Weston if their families happen to live in the paper's circulation area. The section runs daily, usually with a mix of full obituaries that families write and shorter paid death notices that funeral homes submit on a template. If you're trying to find a specific person or dig into family history, here's how the process actually works. You go to the Wausau Pilot and Review website and look for the obituaries section. From there you can search by name. The search function is basic but functional. It pulls results from both the current online obituaries and the archived ones going back several years. The archive depth is one of the things that makes this particular paper worth checking if you're doing genealogy work in central Wisconsin. I spent about three hours one afternoon trying to track down my grandmother's sister, who died in the late 1980s. The search engine on the site kept giving me results for people with the same first name but a different spelling. What I eventually had to do was narrow by date range and cross-reference with the funeral home listings. The Pilot and Review doesn't index obituaries by funeral home, so you have to do that part manually. Once I found the right entry, the full obituary text had the names of surviving family members, which let me confirm it was the right person.
The paid death notices are a different beast entirely. They're usually one or two paragraphs at most and contain the bare essentials: full name, age, date of death, surviving family, and funeral home information. The full obituaries are longer, sometimes three or four pages, and they include biographical details, career history, military service, and personal anecdotes that families contribute. If you're doing genealogical research, the full obituaries are where the useful information lives. The death notices are mostly useful for confirming that someone died and when. One thing beginners miss is that the Wausau Pilot and Review sometimes runs obituaries for people who lived outside Marathon County but had connections to the area. A relative might have moved there later in life, or the family might have chosen to publish there because that's where the funeral service was held. Don't limit your search to just people who lived in Wausau proper. Expand the geographic scope if the initial results are thin. The archive search has a real limitation that trips people up. It doesn't always catch older print-only obituaries that were never digitized. The Pilot and Review started putting more obituaries online in the mid-2000s, but coverage before that is spotty. If you're looking for someone who died before 2005, you might find nothing online. In that case, the Marathon County Public Library has microfilm of the paper going back to the 1800s. It's not glamorous, but it works. The library also has a local history department that can pull clippings for you if you call ahead.
Another edge case I ran into involves name changes. A woman published under her maiden name in the obituary but was known locally by her married name. The search engine returned zero results for the name everyone in the family used. I had to search by her maiden name, which was listed in the survival column, and then match it to the person I was looking for using the date and surviving family members. This happens more often than you'd think, especially with older obituaries where women were listed exclusively by their husband's surname or not at all in the headline. The subscription model is worth noting. Some content on the Pilot and Review website is behind a paywall, including certain archived obituaries. The exact cutoff date for what's free versus what requires a subscription changes periodically, so don't assume everything is locked. Recent obituaries are generally freely accessible. Older ones may require a digital subscription, which runs about fourteen dollars a month if you go that route. If you're compiling family information from multiple obituaries, I'd recommend keeping a simple spreadsheet. Column one for the full name as printed, column two for the date of death, column three for the funeral home, and column four for any links to surviving relatives mentioned. The Pilot and Review obituaries sometimes list relatives who also died recently, and cross-referencing those entries across multiple deaths in the same family can fill in gaps that census records or birth certificates alone won't cover.
Get the Full Details
The paper also runs a weekly compiled obituary page that aggregates the daily notices. It's easier to browse that if you're skimming rather than searching for a specific person. I use that page when I'm checking on whether anyone from my extended family has passed away. It saves time compared to running individual name searches. There are some entries where the information is just wrong. I've seen addresses listed incorrectly, dates of birth off by a year or two, and surviving family members who didn't exist. These are human errors that come from families filling out forms or funeral home staff transcribing quickly. Always verify critical details against other sources before relying on them for anything formal. The obituaries are useful for leads, not definitive records. If you need something specific from an obituary that's behind the paywall and you don't want to subscribe, the Marathon County Public Library reference desk can help. They have access to the paper's archive and can pull copies for a fee. It's cheaper than a monthly subscription if you only need a handful of documents.
The Wausau Pilot and Review doesn't have an API or downloadable dataset for their obituaries. Everything has to be accessed through the website or through physical archives. If you're doing large-scale research, plan for manual collection. It takes time, but the coverage for central Wisconsin is solid enough that it's usually worth the effort.
