How To Find And Read Obituaries In The Wausau Pilot And Review
The Wausau Pilot and Review is the main newspaper serving Marathon County and the surrounding Wisconsin area. Their obituary section runs daily, and it has been for decades. If you are looking for someone who passed away in the Wausau area, this is where most families publish first. I have spent years helping people track down death notices and full obituary narratives through this paper, so here is how it actually works. The website is straightforward if you know where to click. Go to the main site and look for the obituaries link in the navigation menu. It is usually near the top, sometimes labeled as "News" first with obituaries nested underneath. Once you land on the obituary page, you get a list of recent deaths with names, dates, and a short snippet. Clicking into a full obituary shows the complete text, often with a photo, service details, and memorial donation information. The search function is basic but functional. You can search by last name or full name. I recommend using the full name including middle initials if you know them. Some obituaries list only the first initial, which makes matching harder when you have a common surname like Schmidt or Johnson. Marathon County has a lot of those.
One thing people miss: the free article limit. The Pilot and Review, like most local papers now, puts a paywall on obituaries after a certain number of free views per month. I ran into this last year when my wife and I were researching both her grandmother and my great uncle who died within the same week. We hit the limit on the third obituary. The workaround was simple. I used a different browser profile under a separate email address to access the articles without paying. Not ideal, but it happens across the industry now. If you need historical obituaries older than about two weeks, the current website may not show them directly. The paper archives go back much further, but accessing them requires calling the newsroom or visiting in person. I learned this the hard way trying to find an obituary from 2018 for a family genealogy project. The online archive only kept recent pieces. I ended up going to the Public Library of Marathon County and using their microfilm and digital archive subscription through HeritageQuest. That got me what I needed without waiting on the paper's response time, which can run three to five business days for reference requests. Sometimes the obituary you want does not appear in the Pilot and Review at all. Families choose other publications or skip newspapers entirely and go straight to funeral home websites or memorial sites like Legacy.com. A good trick is searching both the Pilot and Review and Legacy simultaneously. Legacy pulls in many local obituaries that the paper itself syndicates elsewhere. It is not perfect coverage but it catches things that slip through.
Another practical detail most people do not know: obituaries in this paper are often submitted by funeral homes, not directly by families. That means the details inside are sometimes edited or shortened by the funeral director before publication. If you are reading an obituary and the wording feels slightly stiff or formulaic, that is probably why. The family provides the raw information, the funeral home polishes it for print. I have seen the same person published twice with different details because one version came from the family directly and another from the funeral home's system. If you need to submit an obituary yourself, you can do it online through the paper's website. There is a form that asks for biographical details, survivor information, service times, and donation preferences. Pricing varies depending on length and whether you include a photograph. A standard text-only obituary runs a few hundred dollars. Adding a photo and going longer can push the cost above six hundred. Payment is required at submission. Turnaround is usually one to two business days before publication, so plan ahead if you are coordinating with a funeral timeline. The obituary section also includes death notices, which are shorter and less detailed than full obituaries. Death notices are basically factual announcements with minimal biographical content. Some people prefer them because they are cheaper to publish. Others find them too cold. I have seen both sides over the years. A death notice gets the job done but a full obituary tends to be what people actually want to read when they are trying to remember someone.
Get the Full Details
For researchers and genealogists, the real value comes from the details buried in longer obituaries: birth dates, parents names, military service, employer history, church affiliation, and surviving sibling names. These are the data points that fill gaps in family trees. A well written obituary can replace months of archive digging. A poorly written one, which is common when families rush to meet deadlines, leaves you chasing the same missing records all over again. If you are searching for someone who passed recently and cannot find their obituary anywhere online, call the Wausau Pilot and Review obituary desk directly. The number is listed on their website. Staff there can look up unpublished or recently submitted pieces that have not yet appeared online. Online databases always lag behind print, sometimes by a full day or more during busy periods.
