Finding and Reading Obituaries at Hamel Lydon in Quincy
Most people searching for these obituaries are either trying to track down a specific memorial, confirm whether someone was served by this funeral home, or gathering genealogy information for family records. The process is straightforward but a little scattered because the obituaries live across a few different places now. The primary home for their obituaries is the funeral home's own website. You go to the Hamel, Sweeney & Lydon Chapel site, navigate to the obituaries or condolences section, and use the search field. You can filter by last name, date range, or first name. Results usually show up within a few seconds. If the person you're looking for passed recently, they're listed on the home page under recent notices. Older ones get buried in the archives. The site typically retains obituaries indefinitely, but the formatting changes over the years, so very old records from the early 2010s might look different from current listings.
The Cremation Society of Massachusetts also maintains an online obituary page that sometimes overlaps with Hamel Lydon cases, especially when cremation was the chosen disposition. It's worth checking both if your initial search comes up empty. I ran into a specific issue last year trying to locate an obituary for a woman who passed in late 2018. Her name had a hyphenated last name, and the search tool on the funeral home's site didn't handle it well. Typing the full hyphenated name returned nothing. What worked was searching for just the first portion of the surname, which pulled up the right record. The funeral home staff confirmed the hyphen was dropped in their database entry. If you hit a dead end like that, calling the office directly at (617) 479-7900 will get you past whatever formatting quirk is blocking the search. For people who want the original printed version rather than the online text, the Quincy (Quincy Sun) and the Boston Globe both ran notices through this funeral home. The Boston Globe's archive requires a subscription, but the Quincy Sun's older issues are sometimes available through the Massachusetts State Library's digital collection or at the Quincy Public Library on Warren Avenue. They keep physical copies on file for about five years before microfilming.
There's a counter-intuitive thing most people miss about these records. The obituary published online is not always the final version. Families often submit an initial notice, then edit it later with updated service details, survivor lists, or charity donation preferences. The online version gets overwritten. If you're doing genealogy work and the names or dates don't match what you expect, check the date stamp on the page carefully. The most recently edited version is the one currently displayed, not necessarily the original. Another thing that catches people off guard: the funeral home posts condolence messages publicly on the obituary page. Those are timestamped and signed with the submitter's full name. If you're researching a family and see a condolence from someone whose name doesn't appear in the obituary itself, that person may have been a friend, coworker, or distant relative not listed in the formal notice. It's a useful cross-reference for building out family trees, but it's easy to overlook. The main limitation of using these online obituaries is that they're self-submitted. The funeral home doesn't fact-check the details beyond basic formatting. Birth dates, surviving family members, and military service claims are all written by the family or the designated contact person. I've seen at least two cases where the birth year was off by a decade because the person filling out the form pulled the date from memory rather than a document. Always verify critical dates against a death certificate or cemetery record if you need them for official purposes.
Get the Full Details
If you need a certified copy of the death certificate rather than just the obituary, that's a separate process handled by the Massachusetts Registry of Vital Records and Statistics. The funeral home can provide a copy of the obituary itself, but they don't issue death certificates. That goes through the state, and it takes about two to three weeks if you're mailing the request in. For quick lookups, the funeral home's own site is your fastest route. No registration, no paywall, just a name and a search box. The obituaries are free to read and free to share, though the funeral home does ask that you don't republish the full text elsewhere without permission. A link back to their page is the standard courtesy.
