United States Obituaries

An obituary is a good source for information about a person. It gives the name of the deceased and the death or burial date. It may also contain information such as the birth date, marriage date, names of parents and spouse, children, occupation, education, and the location of living family members at the time the obituary was written. Obituaries are usually printed in a newspaper or in a local history.

The following suggestions can help you locate obituaries online:


 * Cyndi's List at http://www.cyndislist.com/ contains many links to obituary-related sites. Scroll down and click the topics Obituaries or Newspapers.
 * Use a Google search to look for online obituaries. To do this you need to find the name of the paper in the location where you think the death took place. Web sites www.refdesk.com/paper.html and http://library.uncg.edu/news/  help you see if there was a paper near the locality. Once you find the name, type the name of the location and the word newspaper or obituary.

Local genealogical and historical societies, public libraries, and some newspaper publishers maintain clipping files of obituaries. Printed abstracts of obituaries can also be found in various published sources, such as genealogical periodicals. A bibliography of published sources is: Jarboe, Betty M. Obituaries: A Guide to Sources. Second Edition. Boston, Massachusetts: G. K. Hall, 1989. (FHL book 973 V43j 1989.) An appendix describes obituary indexes available at major libraries.

The following suggestions can help you locate other published obituaries. The United States Newspaper Program at www.neh.gov/projects/usnp.html will help you determine the name of the repository where obituaries are kept. On the site, click the state where the paper was published. Film copies of newspapers can be loaned to your local public or academic library. Contact the librarian to order the film from the repository that appears for that state.

Some obituaries are published in local genealogical and historical society Web sites. Go to The USGenWeb Project at www.usgenweb.org or The WorldGenWeb Project at www.worldgenweb.org/ to learn more.

Other sites host large collections of obituaries arranged by geographical locations. GenealogyBuff.com has a large data library with hundreds of thousands of obituaries from varying timeframes. There are two large user-contributed obituary forums, one for the United States and the other for Canada.

The Family History Library has some obituaries. Go to the Family History Library Catalog to find book and film numbers for them. The following instructions will help you find records for a specific locality using the Place Search:


 * 1) Go to www.familysearch.org
 * 2) Click the Library tab
 * 3) Click Family History Library Catalog
 * 4) Click Place Search
 * 5) Type the locality that you want to search, and click Search.
 * 6) A list of matches will appear. Click on the locality that most closely matches the one you want.
 * 7) In the Topics area, click on Obituaries or Newspapers to view the record holdings.

www.Ancestry.com (a subscription site) has good search capability for their obituary collection for the United States and Great Britain.