An obituary can name a person’s parents, spouse, children, brothers and sisters, the towns they lived in and where they are buried. Here is a practical checklist for finding obituaries and getting the most out of them.
1. Find the date and place of death
Newspapers are organized by date and town, so start with a death date and place. Look for them in a death index or death certificate, the Social Security Death Index, a grave marker (Find a Grave and BillionGraves have millions), census records or family papers. Our state guides list each state’s death indexes.
2. Search the right papers
- Search the paper where the person died, and also where they were born, grew up or lived for many years.
- Search a week or two after the death; small-town weeklies sometimes ran notices later.
- Check foreign-language, religious and community papers as well as the main daily.
- Use free archives such as Chronicling America and state newspaper projects first, then subscription sites such as Newspapers.com and GenealogyBank, which many libraries offer free.
3. Search smart
- Try initials, nicknames, middle names and misspellings. Scanned text often misreads old type.
- In older papers, married women were often listed under the husband’s name (“Mrs. John Smith”).
- Search the names of a spouse or child if the person’s own name finds nothing.
4. Read every name
Note everyone mentioned: survivors and their towns, family members who died earlier, pallbearers, the officiant and the funeral home. Married daughters are often listed by their husbands’ names, which gives you their married surnames. Pallbearers and out-of-town mourners are often relatives too.
5. Look around the obituary
Check the same paper for a few days before and after: news stories about an accident or illness, a card of thanks from the family, estate and probate notices, and reports of out-of-town visitors who came for the funeral.
6. Confirm what you find
Obituaries were written quickly by grieving families and can contain mistakes in ages, dates and spellings. Confirm key facts with death certificates, census records, cemetery and funeral home records, and keep a note of where each fact came from.
7. Ask for help
If the paper isn’t online, state libraries, archives and local public libraries will often look up an obituary for free or a small fee when you give them the name, date and place. Many will also lend newspaper microfilm through interlibrary loan.