Several years ago, when I was going regularly to LDS Family History Centers to look at microfilmed records I found that when the church filmed newspaper obits they had a certain amount of funds to film each newspaper. They started in January and filmed until the funds ran out. The newspaper I was interested in, at the time, was the Oakland Tribune. Most years that I looked at film for, ended each microfilm about July, with a few ending in September. The same was true for the San Jose Mercury and News. Then Ancestry began their newspaper collection which covered even fewer editions. So some newspapers were never filmed, some dates were never filmed and some were never picked up by the different newspaper archives. Most of the obits I successfully found were searched by date then, manually covering each date in the range around the death date. Many obits were published in a tinier font than the rest of the newspaper and those were more poorly indexed by the indexers of the papers. My advice is to figure out;
1. Which newspaper was likely to have the obit (mostly where the children of the deceased lived) 2. When an obit was likely then manually search to see if that date and paper are included in the raw LDS newspaper microfilm collections.
3. Look into other collectors of newspaper archives and find who has archived them. (Like the San Jose Mercury news microfilms are held at the library on the edge of the university in San Jose. The late Henry Snyder, a professor at UC Riverside was attempting to find out who held California newspaper archives and make that information available. Most of these newspapers have never been indexed for easy searching. Sorry this is a bit long but most people just starting to search newspapers don't understand why a single obit might be hard to find.
