Obituaries

Charlotte's Obituary Journal

When she was very young, Mrs. Earl (Charlotte Mikesell) Gunnell of Soda Springs, Idaho, decided to keep a journal of deaths and other various information items for Caribou County. Some of the early information she wrote down came from old newspapers. The information included a section of Bannock County which is now part of Caribou County. There are also a few records from Bear Lake County, Franklin County and some in Wyoming. She kept these records until 1997, just before she entered a care center. She died in January 2003. We have been asked to transcribe this information and place it on the Internet for the benefit of genealogists interested in these records. Some private remarks are in brackets to note a particular area or subject. The spelling, punctuation, abbreviations and style of writing is Mrs. Gunnell’s and we have not tried to correct it unless it needed to be made clear or we knew the particulars. Note: Residents of the area have always used the term “Soda” to mean Soda Springs, the name of Gray to mean Gray’s Lake and Lava to mean Lava Hot Springs. The questions of burial ? or buried ? at the end of some items are Mrs. Gunnell’s notations.

Some of the records were just short notations. We have decided to include the obituary, if possible, whenever we could find it. We hope the additional information will be useful. We also found the style of writing obituaries during this period of time to be very interesting. We would like to thank Dianne Brown for scanning and sending this information to us from Mrs. Gunnell’s original records. We also thank Jeff Anderson for entrusting Mrs. Brown to do the scanning from Mrs. Gunnell’s book. What a treasure this is for all genealogists!

Arlene M. Henley, Transcriber
Della Maughan Britenbeker, Historian