Getting at the Alamosa Valley Courier archives is not straightforward, but it is possible if you know where to look
The Alamosa Valley Courier is a small weekly paper serving the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado. Their obituaries go back decades, probably further, but they are not all neatly digitized in a single searchable database. When I was tracking down a great-uncle who died in the mid-1980s, I hit a wall pretty quickly. The newspaper's own website had a few recent articles but absolutely nothing from before about 2015. I ended up spending two hours on the phone with their office just confirming whether they kept physical archives at all. Turns out they do, but they are stored in binders at the paper's office on Main Street in Alamosa, and they do not offer online access to pre-2000 material. I went in person, brought a notebook, and copied what I needed. It took about forty minutes and cost me nothing. If you are not local, that is a real problem. There are actually a handful of ways to get at these records depending on how far back you need to go and how much patience you have. The route is contacting the newspaper directly. Their business office number is listed on their site and they will sometimes email you a copy if you provide a date range and a name. This works reasonably well for obituaries from 2000 onward. Beyond that, your options narrow significantly. The Alamosa County Public Library holds microfilm copies of the Courier going back to at least the 1950s. I used their microfilm reader to pull records for my grandmother's side of the family and found three obituaries that were not digitized anywhere else. The library is small, the microfilm equipment is old and finicky, and you need a library card to use the machines. You can usually get a free one if you walk in, or sometimes you can request scans through their interlibrary loan system which takes about two weeks. Another angle that most people miss is that the Boulder Daily Camera and the Denver Post sometimes picked up obituaries from the San Luis Valley area, particularly for families who wanted broader distribution. I found one of my ancestor's obits originally published in the Courier reposted in the Denver Post archives, which meant I could access it through the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection at the state library. That collection is free and online, though the OCR quality on older Courier text is terrible and searching by name often returns garbage results. You are better off browsing by date. Go to the issue that covers the week of the death and scroll through the obituary section manually.
The Colorado Genealogical Society has some index cards for southwestern Colorado death notices, but their coverage of the Alamosa Valley is spotty at best. I checked their catalog and they had maybe twelve months of the Courier covered between 1970 and 1985. Not enough to rely on, but worth a look if you are doing this locally. The biggest issue with researching these records is that obituary practices in rural Colorado changed dramatically over time. Before the late 1970s, many deaths were announced in a very bare format. A paragraph or two at most, sometimes just a name, date of death, and surviving family. The fuller, more detailed obituaries that genealogists tend to prefer became common later. You need to adjust your expectations accordingly or you will spend weeks getting nothing useful. For the most recent years, the Courier has a website but it is poorly organized. Old articles get buried and there is no archive search function that actually works. I have tried using Wayback Machine snapshots to find pages from the early 2010s but the coverage is incomplete and the pages are often broken. Your best bet there is still to call the office and ask. They are a small staff and they remember who is calling. If you mention you are doing family history research, they tend to be more helpful than if you sound like you are just collecting data. It is a small thing but in places like this, the human element matters more than any database. If you need a large volume of records, the Alamosa County Clerk and Recorder's office maintains death certificates which contain more standardized information than the obituaries. Those are not public record for deaths less than fifty years old, so if you are researching recent relatives you will hit a dead end there. The probate records at the same office can sometimes fill that gap because they list heirs and relationships. I pulled a probate file once that had more useful information than the obituary that accompanied it. The death certificate for the same person was terse and generic. Probate documents are where the actual family connections live.
One more thing that catches people off guard is that the Courier did not publish every obituary in the valley. Some families chose to place notices in the Monte Vista Daily Register or the Rocky Mountain News instead, especially before those publications folded. If you are only looking at the Courier, you are missing a significant chunk of the record. Cross-reference with those other papers if your ancestor died in the surrounding communities. The boundaries between what goes where are fuzzy and it is easy to assume an obit appeared in one paper when it actually ran in another.
Get the Full Details
