Tampa funeral home records

F. T. Blount Funeral Home Records. March, 1924 to October, 1991. From March, 1924 to February, 1967, Blount used large, hard-bound volumes of pre-printed forms to record funeral information.  The information on each funeral was entered by hand in the blanks provided on the form.  As a volume was filled, another was begun, so years are usually split between more than one volume.  Each record consists of one page, and provides a variety of information, including marital status and spouse's name, date and place of birth, date, place and cause of death, occupation, place of residence, place of interment, and the names and birthplaces of the deceased's parents. Also present is information about the funeral arrangements and charges.  The record does not include information about survivors, except for the spouse's name and the name of the person giving the order for the funeral arrangements.  At the front of each volume is an alphabetical surname index covering the individuals in that volume. There is no cumulative surname index covering all the volumes, so it is necessary to know the year of death to find an individual record. In 1967, Blount ceased using the bound volumes and introduced loose-leaf, two-part forms. When completed, the forms were filed in binders by case number, with the most recent at the front.  Each funeral record consists of two forms, a large one and a smaller one.  The forms include much the same information as the entries in the bound volumes, plus additional information not previously collected, such as names of pall bearers, names and addresses of survivors, membership in churches and other organizations, and sometimes (though infrequently) additional biographical data about the deceased.  The large form, which has information on the verso as well as the front, contains information about the deceased and general information about the funeral.  The small form deals with funeral costs and related information. Unlike the bound volumes, the individual binders have no integral surname indexes.  Access is through a separate cumulative index in two notebooks covering the period 1967 to 1991, with surnames grouped by initial letter, then by case number.  Case numbers start with the final two digits of the person's death year (i.e., 67-364).  A person named Alvarez who died in 1967, for example, will be listed in the "A" section of the index in a group with all the other "A" clients who died in 1967.  If the year of death is known, one need only browse names in the group with the correct case number year prefix to locate the person being sought.  This seldom involves browsing more than a page or two of names.  Once the person's case number is obtained, finding the record in the form binders is a simple matter.      A. P. Boza Funeral Home Records. January, 1929 to October, 1991. Beginning in 1929 and for many years thereafter, Boza was a leading funeral home for Tampa's Latin community and handled final arrangements for many Ybor City and West Tampa residents.  From January, 1929 to February, 1986 Boza recorded funeral information in the same type of bound volumes that Blount used, with similar information about the deceased. As with Blount's, the Boza volumes each had a name index at the front. In addition to the individual volume indexes, there are also two separate cumulative surname indexes covering the bound Boza volumes. The first index is labeled "A. P. Boza Funeral Home Master Index," and indexes book 1 (1929) through book 22 (1967). The names indexed are grouped by the initial letter of the surname, then by the number of the book in which the record appears. The second index has "Colon" written on its spine and is an index to clients Boza buried in Tampa's Colon Cemetery. It covers books 1 (1929) through 20 (1965) and is arranged in the same manner as the "Master Index." In 1985, the bound volumes were replaced by the same two-part form used by Blount. The forms are filed in binders and cover the period from December, 1985 to October, 1991. During 1985 and the first two months of 1986, Boza continued to record funeral information in the last of the bound volumes as well as on the loose forms. The binders have no surname indexes, so the death date is required to find the record for a specific person. The forms are not always filed by the exact death date, so it is often necessary to scan through records immediately following the death date until the correct name is located. In addition to the main Boza records, the collection also contains binders with forms generated by Boza's Riverside and Town & Country branch chapels. These binders cover the period from June, 1987 to October, 1989.  As they have no indexes, they also require that the date of death be known to locate a specific record. Lord & Fernandez Funeral Home Records. May, 1947 to May, 1951; January, 1959 to March, 1976. As with A. P. Boza, Lord & Fernandez Funeral Home's primary client base was Tampa's Latin community. Lord & Fernandez recorded funeral information on pre-printed forms with blanks for much of the same sort of information as on the forms used by Blount and Boza. The forms are in binders in chronological order by death date. There is no surname index, so here again it is necessary to have the death date to find a particular record. Garden of Memories Records. February, 1984 to January, 1989. Garden of Memories used the same two-part loose-leaf forms as Blount. The forms are filed in binders by service numbers, which approximate the deceased's death date. There is no surname index, and the death date must be known in order to find an individual record.