How to Find and Use Hidden Clues in Obituaries
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Updated August 9, 2021
In this post
Why obituaries are valuable for genealogy
Where to find obituaries online
How to find obituaries offline
Obituaries are fabulous places to find family history information. Not every person has one, but when they do, they can have some great genealogical details for you to add to your family tree.
But the question is, how do you find someone’s obituary?
Why obituaries are important for genealogy
First, let’s cover why obituaries really are an essential resource in your genealogy toolkit.
They range from simple one-sentence death notices to full-page biographies. Older ones tend to be shorter notices. Although they don’t have as much information, they can still tell you the date, place, and age. Sometimes you may also find a cause of death.
When you find an obituary, be sure to look through all the information so you don’t miss any clues.
Hints you can find inside are:
Maiden names
Kids’ names
Date and place of birth
Addresses
Military service
Where worked
Surviving relatives
How long they were a resident in that town
This simple obituary for my great great grandmother has her age, husband’s name, her street, and how many living children she had. It also names her church. It’s not a lot of details, but it points me to church and land records, and to look into which of her many children were still living.
13 May 1905, Greenfield Gazette and Courier
This obituary gives a general cause of death and where she was buried, pointing to cemetery records. It also shows how many kids she had and how many were still living, although it only names one under a married name. This info can be used to track down which of her kids were still alive. And it gives general information about where she lived and how long she lived in Deerfield. This helps with timelines and locating her address.
12 Aug 1905 Greenfield Gazette and Courier
This amazing obituary for Ellen Blake Nichols has a lot of details. Not only the date she died, but the time. It tells us her husband was Secretary of State for Vermont, which gives a new research avenue into his life. It gives the day and place she was born, her parents, what number child she was, info on her grandfather, and her confirmation information. It says where she spent her summers, who she stayed with, when she got married, how long she lived in Northfield, her children, and funeral information. The obituary also gives the names of her pallbearers for FAN Club research, plus her siblings and where they lived. If only all the obituaries I find could have this much detail! There are so many possibilities of new things to research from this.
Northfield News (Northfield, Vermont), 12 September 1905
[I just noticed all these examples are from 1905! A random coincidence.]
You can see even simple obituaries can give you clues to other research ideas.
The key is to extract as much detail as you can from every obituary, no matter how simple or fancy they are.
Related posts:
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How to find obituaries online
There are a few general buckets of where to find obituaries: free websites, paid websites, and offline repositories.
Free sites for searching for obituaries:
It makes sense to start by searching free sites and databases when starting your hunt for someone’s obituary.
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Library databases. Check your local library to see what databases you can use with your library card.
Chronicling America The Library of Congress has digitized US newspapers from 1789-1963, including ethnic papers.
FamilySearch. Search the catalog to find obituaries and obituary indexes. These collections tend to not be indexed by name, but you can narrow down by place, time, and sometimes by last name.
Elephind. Elephind has over 4200 digitized newspapers available to search.
The Ancestor Hunt. This site has a list of obituary links by state. The focus is on free sites, but some indexes link to repositories that may charge a small fee for the article.
DeathIndexes.com Obituaries Research Guide. This page has links to obituaries for religious and ethnic groups. There's also links to doctors, firemen, and police obituaries.
Find A Grave. Sometimes the memorial for a person will include their transcribed obituary. If you find one, try to find the original article to make sure it was transcribed correctly.
State or locality specific newspaper websites. There are many of these, like NYS Historic Newspapers, the California Digital Newspaper Collection, or even the Boca Raton, FL archives.
Paid sites for obituaries
Don’t miss out on the chance of finding an obituary somewhere just because it’s a paid site! I’ve found many obituaries (and other newspaper articles) for my personal and client research on these sites. It’s well worth a subscription. You can try these out with free trials to see if they will work for your genealogy needs before signing up.
GenealogyBank. GenealogyBank has 13,000 newspaper titles from 1690 to 2020. It says it has the world’s largest online obituary collection, with more added daily.
Newspapers.com. Newspapers.com is part of Ancestry and has over 18,000 newspapers from the 1700s on. They’re the largest online newspaper archive and say they add millions of pages each month.
NewspaperArchive. This database has papers from over 45 countries from 1607-2020, with 108 million obituaries.
Ancestry.com. Ancestry has obituaries and obituary indexes, mostly for the US but also some for Canada, Europe, and Australia. They also have a newspapers.com index which will give you the obituary date, place, and other basic information.
How to find obituaries offline
Not all obituaries can be found online but are still accessible either remotely or in person through Not all obituaries can be found online but still exist in print, microfilm, or another format. You can access some of these either remotely or in person through repositories. Some places may charge small fees to do lookups or provide copies.
Libraries. Check the local library where your ancestor lived. They may have obituaries microfilmed or databases accessible only with a library card. See what resources they have available and they can send you a copy. As an example, the Denver Public Library has a Denver Obituary Project that I got one through.
Historical societies. Historical and genealogical societies can have obituaries in their archives. Some societies will have obituary indexes on their websites that you can search and then contact them for a copy. For example, the Bedford, PA Historical Society has an index of over 100,000 obituaries and you can get a copy for $5.
Books. There are published books of obituaries that may cover the place and time you’re looking. Check out Amazon or your preferred place for books to see if there’s one for the time and place you’re researching. There’s a lot of print books on obituaries out there to try out.
Related posts:
5 Things To Look For In Probate Records To Help You Trace Your Ancestors
How to strengthen your cemetery research skills to find more clues
Search tips for finding online obituaries
Here are some tips to help make your online searching more successful:
It’s most helpful if you have an idea of where the obituary was published, even if it’s just the state you last knew they lived in. This will narrow down your search.
It’s also best if you know the year, but you can search by general time frame if you don’t know when they died.
Wives may be listed under their husband’s name, like Mrs. [Husband Name], so be sure to also search for spouse names.
Search by initials, middle names, abbreviations, and nicknames. You never know what name variation it was published under.
For women, try searching for their maiden name as well if you know it.
Try different spelling variations for first and last names.
Instead of a broad search, try adding terms like “death” or “funeral”, especially if they have a common name
Don’t limit yourself to searching newspapers only in the place your ancestor lived. Sometimes obituaries were published in nearby towns or another town they lived in for a long time
Page through the newspaper. Because online newspapers use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to encode names, sometimes spellings go wonky in indexes and you won’t find them. If you know the date (even generally) and place, try browsing through the newspaper to see if you can find the obituary.
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Why Local History Books Are More Important Than You Think For Genealogy
Final thoughts
There are many fabulous resources for finding old obituaries, including databases, libraries, and published books.
It’s so worth the effort to use as many sources as you can to try to track down an ancestor’s obituary because you can important genealogical clues in them.
Once you’ve finally found those obituaries you’ve been searching for, be sure you maximize every clue you find with this obituary research worksheet. Never miss another clue!
Have you found obituaries that helped you make breakthroughs in your genealogy research? Please share what you found and how you found it!
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