It is regrettable that the majority of newspapers in Skagit County, Washington State do not allow access to the archives of their publications. Therefore, Skagit Valley Genealogical Society has collected and filed as many obituaries as possible. We accept no accuracy for the content of the newspaper articles or the obituaries.

      Obituaries of Skagit County come from multiple sources. This information has been extracted from available weekly newspapers in the smaller communities as well as from the daily editions of the Skagit Valley Herald. Due to name spellings, some obvious errors in dates, etc, and/or typographical errors the Society is not responsible for any errors found in this database. Not all information is available in all obituaries, as some articles may contain only a death or funeral notice. Many of our collection have been donated previous to the organization of the society, and most of these notices do not contain either the newspaper or the date of publication. They have been included here to make the pertinent information available. In some instances, newspaper articles relating to the deaths of individuals have been preserved.

      Some Background: The obituaries have been collected since 1987 when our society was organized. An initial contest gave us a few early obits but none that were consistent. When Dee Ackerman of the Whatcom County Gen Society passed away she had been collecting obits from the Courier Times and the Skagit Argus for many years and some of her files covered the years from 1980-1986, but we have no way of knowing if this is a complete collection as these are both weekly papers and the majority of obits are published in the Skagit Valley Herald. Then a few years ago, Barbara Harris and her nephew Kenneth Klaus donated some papers from the 70's but I am not sure how many or if they are a complete collection of years. We have no way of knowing for certain on this. Mollie Sackman, John and Shirlee Fisher and others in the society have been in charge of clipping obituaries from local papers since the society was formed. Barbara Ricketts and Norma Keefe-Hills are presently doing that job. The clippings were filed and the Obituary Name Index File was put together in Excel format by Hazel Rasar. Barbara and Norma continue this work.

      I haven’t come up with the fancy search engine (yet) to make it easier to find the name you are looking for. But I will point out that you can use your web browsers Search and/or Find feature by going up to EDIT...scroll down to FIND...when the Find what: box comes up, type in the surname you are looking for...click the Find Next button and keep using this button until you find the person you are looking for, (or just scroll down) provided we have their obituary in our files. Obituaries in this index are also in alphabetical order to make it easier to locate your persons of interest.

      Please note: The current file has been UPDATED January 2009 and contains obituaries old (recently donated) and new through September 2008 contains over 29,000 names in all local Skagit County newspapers. Depending on how fast your computer is and if you are using the ‘ol phone lines or the faster DSL, cable modem, etc. The file could take a while to download, please be patient. If you are having any problems, please contact the webmaster, who would be glad to look up a name for you.

      Copies of these obituaries may be obtained by writing to our society and we will photocopy whatever is available on this list for a cost of $8.00 (full obit) $3.00 death notice, also $1.00 for additional pages such as newspaper articles. Please include SASE. Remit to: Skagit Valley Genealogical Society; att’n Genealogist, P.O. Box 715, Conway, WA 98238-0715. Or e-mail our genealogist, Diane Partington from this website itself. Monies recieved from this fund go to help the continuing works of this society.