Another of the services at Pettett Funeral Home is placing the obituary in our local newspapers. Our funeral home will help you and your family organized some of the statistical and personal information on the person who has died, or you can bring the information to our funeral home. Some families wish to place a picture of the deceased in the newspaper. There can be other people in the picture with the deceased and on our computer, we can scan and crop just the portion of the picture that is needed for the newspaper photo. This is another service that our funeral home does for you and your family. Plus, the picture can be immediately given back to the family. For instance, sometimes, that might be the only picture a family has of the deceased person.
(Sometimes a member of a family has passed away in Florida, California, or another part of Illinois and that person grew up in the Murphysboro area, but the funeral services are where that person died and you wish to put his or her obituary in the local newspaper. Our funeral home will help you do that and the charges are just what the newspaper will charge our funeral home.)
In the Murphysboro area, there are a couple of local newspapers, we have listed the ones we use most frequently with some of their charges for obituaries. There are other newspapers in the area and we will help place the obituary in any newspaper for you. Some newspapers charge per obituary and some charge for the length of the obituary.
1. The Southern offers a family a choice of a free obituary that would have the name of the deceased, age, time and date of death, and the funeral services; and the newspaper will include the photo with a free obituary. For a full obituary, there is a charge for the length of the obituary minus one inch (which is the approximate length of the free obituary, that the paper would give). For an obituary with a picture, most of the time it averages out to be about $ 125.00, but it can be more if there is a lot of relatives listed or a lot of information included in the obituary. But for other obituaries without a picture it is based on the length of the obituary.
2. There are some smaller local area papers that our funeral home can place obituaries into; for example, the DuQuoin Evening Call or the Anna Gazette.
3. The St. Louis Post Dispatch can be rather expensive, even several hundreds of dollars. Sometimes what we do is to shorten the length of the obituary and call for a quote, before we place the obituary in the newspaper.
4. Other larger city newspapers are like the St. Louis Post Dispatch, obituaries can be very expensive, so we usually ask for a quote.