Hi Cathy, I just did a Google search searching for "Newspaper obits Bakersfield" (don't use quotes <g>) and got lots of hits. Bet you can find the newspaper and your obit. Things seem to be all linked into Legacy these days... I've recently found several this way and they come to my screen .... just like magic from the local paper.... - ALSO - I saved this old post that Sharon Dulcich posted in 2008. I was very impressed with this site (tho a little hard to get a handle on at first...). I found an obit on a cousin who died in San Fernando Valley - it is a cinch and free supplied by the Library that I selected in the area of interest. Southern California offers so little I felt it was a good lead to have this - so I saved it.. Hope you are as successful, as I was... I've sent the whole post, but good change Sharon does not have the same e-mail address. She moved to Texas, I think - but used to do so much work in So California for the list... Here's her post. I know you are asking about Kern county and this is about a query in LA County - but maybe KERN CO is also in this site... ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --- Los Angeles County is very big. The area is very user unfriendly due to distance, traffic, costs, etc. Not very many people had obits in the Los Angeles Times and there are/were at least 100 other newspapers for the various towns and cities of the county. Many deaths were simply not noted in the newspapers by obituaries or funeral notices, since this is not a requirement in California Unless you are certain which newspaper an obit would be found in, locating one could take weeks since obituaries could appear in many different newspapers, and the different libraries have different papers depending on their location, & no library in Southern California has copies of all of them. A volunteer cannot just go to one place and have access to all the possible papers of Los Angeles Co. Most deaths that are noted in the newspapers receive only a funeral notice (not an actual obituary article), and these are not indexed, nor were they always in the same place in the newspaper. In the early years, there wasn't even a column for these notices, and one must search each page of the newspapers carefully when looking for obituaries or funeral notices. However, it is possible to find obituaries in Southern California. Please visit this website that gives very good instructions about locating an obit in Southern California: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~socalobituaries/ You might also get the death cert and find out the name of the Funeral Director and then, if possible, contact them to see if an obit was even submitted to any newspaper and if so, which one. Sharon Dulcich ([email protected]) Kern Co. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------- Good luck, obits are so great to have... Ruth ____________________ Ruth (Grady) Skewis [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2012 1:30PM To: [email protected] Subject: [NORCAL] obit request Is there someone in the Kern County area who can look up an obit for me? I just discovered that a distant cousin died there and I'm curious about him. Arthur Lutes died 15 Dec. 1993 last res., Bakersfield Thanks so very much, Cathy The road to life begins at 70 old Chinese saying, courtesy of my daughter-in-law ----------------------------------------- NORCAL ARCHIVES: http://archiver.rootsweb.com/ Enter NORCAL. Browse by month. Or click the "Search all archives" link to search by keyword. ----------------------------------------- To post a message to the NORCAL mailing list, send an email to [email protected] ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message