Our Story
Thank you for liking our page and welcome to our family of Masters Funeral Home facebook friends.
I have put together some thoughts about our funeral home which I hope you will find interesting and helpful.
Our family has been serving the families of Putnam County and surrounding counties for the past 66 years and we count it an honor to be the county's most trusted family in funeral service. We are also honored to have received the "Best Funeral Home" and "Best Crematory" Readers' Choice Awards from the Palatka Daily News for 2019. We are the only local funeral home with the “best funeral home” status to have been selected by local people, not an out-of-town concern. I have had the privilege of personally serving families through our funeral home for the past 48 years.
I live on the premises and am usually able to meet with families on a moment’s notice if the need arises and to provide additional security after hours.
The selection of a casket is a major decision and we are proud to be one of the remaining Palatka funeral homes to still have a fully stocked casket selection room to accommodate our families. We realize the selection of a casket is a major purchase and our families appreciate being able to actually see what they are purchasing. Our least expensive casket is the cloth covered casket. Every family which comes into my casket selection room sees this casket, unlike some funeral homes which only make this casket available when a family is short of funds.
I do not mark up the cost of flowers when I order flowers for a family, nor will I accept a discount from a florist. That means every penny I am given for flowers goes for flowers so my families get more and nicer flowers for their money.
While some other funeral homes charge (like 4%) to file for life insurance, we do not charge our families for this service. We are not dependent upon a third party to open graves. Our own staff from Palatka Memorial Gardens opens graves at other local cemeteries, as well. These dedicated men, who answer directly to me, usually open the graves the day before the funeral in case they should run into a problem, like a hidden tree stump.
To better serve our families our Palatka funeral home, located directly across from Oak Hill Cemetery, is the most spacious in the county providing the largest seating capacity in our chapel with the most on-site parking which has recently been repaved.
Behind the funeral home we operate our own crematory which is the only one in Palatka. We have the only Putnam County crematory which does not cremate for out of town funeral homes. That way we are able to give our own families 100% of our attention. Our crematory is only operated by licensed funeral directors, who are held to a higher standard. The loved ones entrusted to us are safely kept in the confines of our funeral home building, not in an out-of-town out-building.
We offer expert monument service, shipping service and we have a very close relationship with Palatka Memorial Gardens, which my family owns and I manage. By calling our funeral home we can make all the arrangements for burial in Palatka Memorial Gardens and by using our funeral home our families receive a $400.00 discount on cemetery charges.
We are able to erect cemetery monuments of all types and sizes, including mausoleums. We installed the walk-in mausoleum with the bronze door and stained glass window on the east side of Oak Hill East Cemetery. To give an example of the type of monument work we do, please look in the Oak Hill West Cemetery (the old drive-in theater), especially in the back. You will see a lot of leaning monuments. Some say this is because of too much irrigation. The odd thing is none of my monuments are leaning. That's because we put a good foundation under our monuments.
Besides myself we also have three other full-time licensed funeral directors and embalmers on staff, David LeVeck, Claud Beckman and Wayne Osterling. David and Claud have been employed here for over 20 years and, like myself, are second generation funeral directors and embalmers. We also honored to have other dedicated long term support staff.
We offer a complimentary Video Tribute made from photos our families share of their loved ones. My wife of 42 years, Frankie Hunter Masters, produces these videos and we have received a lot of positive feedback because of all of the extra work she puts into this added service. We pioneered the use of Video Tributes among Putnam County funeral homes.
We post our obituaries on our page which reaches over 5000+ people, much more than our competitors, which helps to get the word out due to declining readership of the Palatka Daily News. We also post our obituaries on our website, www.themastersfuneralhomes.com . We will also keep you informed about other events at our funeral home, like our Christmas reception at our Palatka funeral home and our Memorial Day service held at Palatka Memorial Gardens.
I appreciate your interest in our page and please feel free to contact me at 386-325-4564 if I can ever be of assistance to you. Thank you. Quincy Masters
