United States Obituaries

United States   Obituaries

Overview
An obituary is a published or unpublished death announcement. A particular obituary may be a simple two line death notice or an elaborate biography of the deceased. Obituaries may be a good source of information about a person and may also include information about family members. Obituaries usually give the name of the deceased and the death or burial date. They 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 funeral program, a newspaper or in a local history.

Sources for Obituaries
Obituaries have only been specifically indexed online for the past few years. You will find that obituary indexes will usually only date from the late 1960s or 1970s. However, many obituaries have been published in newspapers and the number of online collections for newspapers is growing. You may wish to see United States Newspapers and Digital Historical Newspapers


 * 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.


 * FamilySearch Research Classes Online


 * 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.

An obituary index, the Obituary Daily Times (ODT), is hosted on RootsWeb. Founded in 1995, ODT has more than 13,000,000 indexed obits, and the list is increasing at the staggering rate of 2,500 a day. It is entirely supported by volunteers, numerous submitters, and a host of moderators.This free index is among the largest in the world, and searching is easy. You can also subscribe to the related Obituary Daily Times Mailing List for a regular index update. Instructions for subscribing are on the web site. As this is an ongoing project, one would want to check it periodically.

A Funeral Home may also help in locating an obituary. For assistance in locating a funeral home, FuneralHomes.com, may help in locating a particular funeral home within a given State.

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 and search for individual names
 * 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) Click Keywords search, enterObituaries or Newspapers to view the record holdings.

There is also a Mennonite Obituaries Index 1930-2001 online. Index is from The Mennonitische Rundschau. Index covers the world and includes the following: • Surname • Given Name • Maiden Name • Birth Year • Death Year • Place of death • Country • Issue • Page

You can read the actual Menonite Obituaries Here. If your family is from Pennsylvania, Illinois or many eastern states they may be found on this site.

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

Websites

 * GenDisasters contains newspaper articles about train wrecks, tornadoes, fires, accidents and other explosions. Often these articles contain detailed death information.
 * Genealogy Buff - Library - Genealogy Data Files
 * ObitsArchives is a large collection of Newspaper obituaries in the United States. Can search by all sources or by location.
 * OldDeathRecords.org contains transcribed obituaries and death notices from the 1800s to about 1960, and necrology lists from various sources.