Unfortunately not a lot of information is known about the Vance Funeral Home in Odell, Nebraska except for the fact that it obviously existed as evidenced by their service record book which we have digitized, indexed and displayed here. We have looked through old newspapers from Odell between 1911 and 1919, the dates these records span, looking for any mention of a Vance Funeral Home or a Vance as an undertaker in or around Odell but have come up empty handed. The closest we have been able to find is a mention of a George Vance as an undertaker for C.F. Steele in 1896 in Fairbury, then we find George Vance working as an undertaker for the Schumann Bonny Co., in 1906 also in Fairbury. The only other Vance we have found in the funeral business is for Ed Vance who was listed as an undertaker at the Vance Funeral Home in Hebron, Nebraska in 1939. Is it possible that a Vance Funeral Home never existed in Odell at all? Yes, we suppose that’s possible however the distances an undertaker would have had to travel regularly during the time period for these records makes it unlikely that this funeral home was located in a town other than Odell.

The records in this collection can vary greatly with the amount of information they contain, some of the forms are filled out fairly completely and yet others seem to have very few details entered.

Page one of this record book is actually hand written record #102, we take that to mean that this book is probably the second book or volume of this funeral home’s record set. We believe the first record book for this funeral home was either in a completely different format than this book or the funeral service records were kept in a different manner than displayed here. Of the 300 pre-printed pages in this book only the first 140 pages have been used to record funeral services by this business, we of course have no idea why they stopped using this funeral service register.