Obituary & Other Newspaper Indexes

Vital records indexes include the birth, marriage, divorce and obituary citations from the local newspaper.  On the search result screens we have provided information on obtaining copies of citations from us by mail.  Other options for obtaining copies include visiting our facility to view and/or copy from the microfilm; using interlibrary loan from your local library to obtain a microform copy of the source; or visiting another library or the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison who has the title.

The obituary index contains citations for area deaths from 1904-1956; 1983-present, but you will find a few scattered records before 1904. From 1992-present you are also searching women's birth (maiden) names when that information was supplied in the obituary. If you have an exact date of death for someone who had ties to La Crosse, email us at archives@lacrosse.lib.wi.us or call us at (608) 789-7136 and we will search for it. We also have a statewide index to death certificates filed in Wisconsin 1959-1967; 1969-1991 which we can use to find a date of death.

Marriage citations date from 1987-present, and divorce notices date from 1992. Since 1992 the source of marriage information is either the wedding announcement from the newspaper or from information extracted from the La Crosse County Courthouse. The divorce notices do not give the wife's birth (maiden) name. For fairly current divorce cases of many Wisconsin counties including La Crosse, try the Wisconsin Circuit Court Access database.

The birth (indexed by parents' names) citations date from 1987-present. Please note that the birth index does not include the child's name, nor do these include photographs of the child. Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center does maintain an online file of children born at their hospital going back approximately six months on their web site.

Cemetery Index

La Crosse County cemetery information was gathered mainly between 1976-1990 by volunteers of the La Crosse Area Genealogical Society. Because this information was gathered over time, dates of coverage of individual cemeteries vary. For example, Farmington Cemetery was visited in May 1987 and does not include burials after that date, while the Catholic Cemetery was surveyed in 2000-2002 and contains fairly recent burials.

We have also tried to gather as much history of the various cemeteries as possible and have mapped their locations under an area we call La Crosse County Cemetery Map & Histories.