Connecticut has printed death notices for more than 260 years, and its earliest ones survive in one of the best-indexed collections in the country: the Hale Collection, which abstracts notices from the state’s first 90 newspapers.
Connecticut obituaries in historic newspapers
The Connecticut Gazette began in New Haven in 1755, and the Hartford Courant, founded in 1764, is often called the oldest continuously published newspaper in the United States. Colonial and early republic papers rarely ran obituaries as we know them. A death usually appeared as a line or two in a “Deaths” column, sometimes with the person’s age, town and a short tribute, and notices for people from neighboring towns were common.
In the 1930s the Works Progress Administration, under Charles R. Hale, abstracted those early death and marriage notices along with cemetery inscriptions. The newspaper abstracts run from roughly 1750 to the end of the Civil War and are filed alphabetically by surname, so they work as a statewide death index for a period before Connecticut kept consistent vital records.
From the late 1800s the larger dailies in Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport and Waterbury carried longer obituaries, and many towns supported weekly papers that reported local deaths in detail. Those later papers are mostly on microfilm at the Connecticut State Library, with a growing share digitized through Chronicling America and commercial databases.
Where to find Connecticut obituaries
Digitized Connecticut newspapers
- Connecticut Newspapers guide, Connecticut State Library — Where to find digitized and microfilmed Connecticut papers, title by title.
Obituary and death indexes
- Hale Collection (FamilySearch) — Free index and images of the WPA abstracts of early Connecticut newspaper death notices and cemetery inscriptions.
Archives and libraries
- Connecticut State Library — The state’s largest newspaper microfilm collection, available in Hartford and through interlibrary loan.
- Connecticut Newspapers, FamilySearch Research Wiki — Volunteer-maintained guide to Connecticut newspaper archives, indexes and microfilm, with county-by-county links.
Nationwide newspaper archives
- Chronicling America, Library of Congress — Free digitized newspapers from every state. Narrow a search to Connecticut and the years you need.
- Google News Archive — Free scans of hundreds of older newspapers, browsable by title and date.
- Internet Archive newspapers — Free digitized newspapers and microfilm uploaded by libraries.
- FamilySearch — Free obituary indexes, death records and the Social Security Death Index (free account).
- Find a Grave — Volunteer-built cemetery memorials, many with transcribed obituaries.
- Newspapers.com — Large subscription archive of U.S. papers. Many public libraries offer free access.
- GenealogyBank — Subscription archive of historic newspapers and modern obituaries.
- Legacy.com — Obituaries published since about 2000 in most U.S. daily newspapers.
Tips for finding an obituary in Connecticut
- Pin down the date and place first. A death index or death certificate gives the exact date and county, and then you only need to search the local papers for the following week or two.
- Search more than one town. Obituaries often ran in the paper where the person was born or had lived before, not just where they died. Small-town weeklies sometimes published a notice weeks later.
- Look beyond the word “obituary.” Older papers reported deaths under headings like “Died,” “Deaths,” local news and personals columns, funeral notices and cards of thanks. See death notices vs. obituaries.
- Try every spelling. Search initials, nicknames and misspellings, and for married women in older papers, search the husband’s name (“Mrs. John Smith”). Digitized text often misreads old type.
- Ask a librarian. Many public libraries and state archives will look up an obituary for free or a small fee, and newspaper microfilm can often be borrowed through interlibrary loan.