Locked away in the basement safe at the Duggan Welch funeral home on 17th street are old record books, some dating back to the days when the mortuary carried out funeral processions by horse and carriage.
Steven Welch, the current owner, flipped through the pages. The earliest books are in his great-grandfather’s cursive. Later documents are in his grandmother’s handwriting and then his father’s and, finally, his own.
After nearly 100 years in business — its centennial anniversary is officially next year — Duggan Welch Mortuary remains one of longest-enduring mortuaries on what once used to be a corridor of funeral homes.
The records are a kind of family history, as well as a story of a changing San Francisco. Discharged from the military in 1900, Welch’s great-grandfather, William Duggan, found a regular gig driving a horse and carriage in San Francisco for Henrietta Hagan, the daughter of a funeral-parlor owner on Valencia Street.
Duggan and Hagan eventually married, and Duggan entered Hagan’s family trade, opening his own funeral home in 1918 at 1234 Valencia St., now Yoga Tree. Over the next couple of decades, the street would become a corridor for preparing the dead.
A trolley ran down Valencia all the way to Daly City to transport funeral processions to cemeteries outside the city. The train cars had special compartments for placing caskets and flowers, making Valencia an ideal location for a mortuary.