Can our family submit an obituary directly to the newspaper, without the assistance of a funeral home?
Yes. However, because an obituary can be used as a legal document in some circumstances, we need the following information before we will be able to publish the obituary: 1. Your name and a phone number where we can reach you. We cannot publish obituaries submitted to us by an anonymous source. 2. A death certificate for the person whose obituary you would like to submit OR the name and phone number of a funeral home or other official organization, such as a hospital or hospice, which can confirm the person’s death. The organization need not be named in the obituary, but in the absence of a death certificate, we are required to confirm a person’s death with such an organization. If the preferred organization is a medical establishment, rather than a funeral home, please contact them first and authorize them to release the decedent’s date of death to us. Medical establishments will not release this information to us without the family’s consent, because of privacy concerns. 3. Approval
