Finding and Reading Obituaries at Westmoreland Funeral Home in Marion NC
Westmoreland Funeral Home has been handling services in McDowell County for decades. Their obituaries show up on their website and sometimes get picked up by the local newspaper, the McDowell News. If you are looking for someone specific or just browsing to see who passed recently, here is how the process actually works. The homepage has an obituary section, but it is not always obvious where the link lives. Sometimes it sits under "Services" and sometimes it is just a standalone link in the main navigation. I have found myself clicking through three different menus on days when the site was doing some maintenance. The search function, when it works, lets you filter by last name. That is about it. There is no fancy advanced search. The obits themselves follow a fairly standard format. You get the full name, age, date of death, a short biographical sketch, and a list of surviving family members. Westmoreland tends to include service details too, so you know when and where the visitation or funeral is. Some obits mention charitable donations in lieu of flowers. A few include a short photo. Not all of them do, which is worth noting if you are trying to confirm you have the right person.
One thing I run into fairly often is that the online obituaries are not always updated in real time. There is a lag. The family submits the content, then the funeral home formats it, then someone at the office hits publish. I had a situation a while back where I needed to confirm whether a service had already happened or was still upcoming. The obit on the site still listed a future date, but when I called the office directly, they told me the service had been moved up due to weather and had already taken place. The website entry was two days old. Always double-check with a phone call if timing matters for attendance or condolences. Another edge case: Westmoreland sometimes uses initials or nicknames in the obituary body but lists the legal name at the top. I searched for "Robert" and found nothing until I tried "Bob," and then I found the right entry. Conversely, someone might go by a middle name their whole life, and the obit uses the formal version. If your search comes up empty, try alternate name variations before assuming the person is not listed there. The downside to relying on the Westmoreland site alone is that coverage can be incomplete for people who had services at other nearby funeral homes but lived in the Marion area. Westmoreland only publishes obituaries for the people they are actually serving. If you are researching family history and someone in the area died before Westmoreland existed or passed through another provider, you will need to look elsewhere. The McDowell County public library has historical newspaper archives, and the NC Digital Collections site has digitized older obituaries from regional papers going back quite far. For anything pre-1990s, the funeral home website is not going to help you.
If you want to submit an obituary or request changes to an existing one, you call the office. The phone number is listed on the contact page. You will need to provide the deceased full name, date of death, biographical details, and surviving family information. They typically ask for a life story paragraph rather than a full memoir. Keep it concise. Most obits run between 200 and 400 words. Anything longer gets cut or summarized without much notice, so don't pad it unnecessarily. For download or archive purposes, the site does not offer a bulk download option. Each obituary is a standalone webpage. If you need to collect multiple entries for genealogy research, your best bet is to print each one individually or use a browser extension to save pages as PDFs. I have used a simple bookmarklet script that opens all obituary links from the recent listings page and saves them automatically. It takes maybe ten minutes to process a week's worth of entries. The manual way takes about two hours if there are more than twenty names. A few practical things to keep in mind:
Get the Full Details
The obituary listings usually retain entries for several years, but they do get rotated out eventually. I noticed after about five years that some older entries disappeared from the main listing and required a direct URL to access. There is no archive search tool on the site itself. If you know the person's name and approximate date of death, you can often guess the URL pattern, which usually follows something like /obituaries/[last-name]-[first-name]/. Privacy is another factor. Westmoreland does not publish the full address of the family residence in obituaries, which is standard practice these days. They list the city, sometimes the county, and the funeral home address for service details. If you are trying to locate a living relative through the obituary alone, you will need to use other public records resources. The family list in the obit is useful for identifying potential connections, but it is not a directory. The funeral home's phone number is (828) 693-4141. That is the main line. The office is on East Main Street in Marion. Hours are typical business hours, Monday through Friday, with limited Saturday availability. Calling during the week is faster than emailing, which is worth knowing because email responses can take a day or two depending on staffing.
For people doing serious genealogical work in McDowell County, I also recommend cross-referencing with Find a Grave. Many Westmoreland interments show up there with memorial photos and sometimes transcriptions of the headstone text. The cemetery records are separate from the funeral home, but the overlap is significant enough that it saves time checking both.
