How to Navigate Obituaries for Fairfield, Illinois
Fairfield is a small city in Jefferson County, population around eleven thousand. When someone passes away there, the local media landscape is limited compared to what you would find in Chicago or Springfield. Most obituaries run through the Jefferson County Journal or are posted through funeral homes that serve the area. Understanding where to look and how to access historical records matters more than you might expect, especially if you are doing genealogical research or trying to verify details about a family member. The abbreviation you referenced ties into local broadcasting and community records. WFIW was a radio station that operated in the Fairfield area for several decades before its license went inactive. Some older obituary references circulate online under names that include that call sign because community announcements and death notices were occasionally read over the station or cross-referenced in their community bulletins. You will find scattered mentions of this on genealogy forums and in digitized newspaper archives, but there is no single centralized database labeled exactly that phrase. The reality is more tedious. I spent probably thirty hours over a couple of weekends tracking down obituaries for relatives who died between 1978 and 1994 in that area. The main problem I ran into was that the Fairfield Progress and the Jefferson County Journal merged their print operations at different points, and the microfilm at the Jefferson County Public Library does not cover every single week. Gaps exist. I found a notice for my great uncle that was listed in a funeral home record but entirely absent from the newspaper microfilm. The workaround was calling the funeral home directly. They kept paper files going back to the late seventies, and the clerk actually photocopies pages for relatives who request them. It took about twenty minutes on the phone and they mailed the copy three days later.
If you are searching for recent obituaries, the straightforward path is to check the websites of funeral homes that handle services in Fairfield. R.D. Smith Funeral Home and other regional providers post full obituaries on their sites within hours of publication. These typically include service times, surviving family members, and sometimes links to the newspaper version. For anything older than five years, you are generally looking at microfilm or scanned archives. The Jefferson County Public Library maintains microfilm collections for both the Fairfield Progress and the Jefferson County Journal. They also have a genealogy room with some digitized records, though the digitization is incomplete. You can visit in person or call ahead to see if a specific date range has been scanned. Being specific helps. Asking for "obituaries from 1985" is not useful. Asking for "the issue from March 12, 1985" gets you results faster. Another route that works better than most people realize is the Illinois State Genealogical Society. They have transcribed collections from various county newspapers, and Jefferson County is represented. The transcription quality varies because it depends on volunteer effort, but it is searchable online if you create a free account. I found three obituaries through that route that I had missed in the microfilm because the paper copies were damaged or the indexing was incorrect.
For the oldest records, before about 1960, you may need to go through the Jefferson County Clerk's office for death certificates. These are not public records immediately. There is a twenty-four month restriction in Illinois before unrestricted access is granted. After that period, anyone can request a copy for a fee, usually around ten to fifteen dollars per copy. The application process is online through the Illinois Department of Public Health, but you can also pick up forms at the county clerk's office in Mount Vernon, which is the county seat near Fairfield. A few things that catch people off guard:
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- Funeral home websites are often more complete than newspaper archives for the last two decades. Newspaper editors routinely edit or shorten obituaries to fit space constraints. Funeral home versions tend to be the full text as submitted by the family.
- Spelling variations in surnames are extremely common in records from the early twentieth century. A name might appear as "Schmidt" in one document and "Schmitt" in another. Search both.
- The WFIW radio reference you see online is mostly a legacy naming convention. It does not correspond to an active archive or a maintained website. Any link you find with that exact phrase is likely a fan page or a genealogy forum post, not an official resource.
If you need help locating a specific obituary and know the full name and approximate date of death, the most efficient method is to start with the funeral home that handled the arrangements, then move to the library microfilm, and finally check the state genealogical society transcription if the first two routes come up empty. The whole process usually takes between two and six hours depending on how far back you are going and how well the records were preserved.
