Maine Obituaries

Obituaries may provide information such as the age of the deceased, birth date and place, names of living relatives and their residences, maiden name, occupation, death date, cause of death, and place of burial. Deceased family members are frequently mentioned. Obituaries may also mention previous places of residence, immigration information, religion, and any social organizations or activities in which the deceased was involved.

Generally, the first step to obtaining an obituary is to find the death date of the person so that the obituary can be more easily found in a newspaper. Death dates may be obtained from the Statewide death index, or cemeteries in the local area where the person is believed to have died. Once a death date is known, the local library in the area may be contacted to learn whether or not they have newspapers for the time period needed, and if someone is willing to look for an obituary in that newspaper. If the newspapers are not held at the library, the local newspaper office may also be contacted to learn where older editions of the newspaper are kept. Some libraries and even newspaper publishers keep obituary files.

Online Resources

 * 1980-2014 at FamilySearch - How to Use this Collection; index & images
 * 2003-2011 Newspaper Obituary collection for Maine: starts about 2003 to 2011 ($)
 * Maine Obituaries at ObitsArchive
 * Maine Obituaries at LDS Genealogy
 * Maine State Library Obituary Search at Maine.gov; index
 * Obituaries for Maine at Archives.com($)
 * Obituaries for Maine at ProQuest($)
 * Online Maine Death Indexes, Cemeteries and Obituaries at Deathindexes.com; index
 * United States Obituary Collection for Maine at Ancestry($)


 * Maine Newspaper Project at Digital Maine
 * Historical Newspapers at Chronicling America
 * Community Newspapers digitized by Advantage Preservation
 * Historical Newspaper Archive at Google News
 * America's Historical Newspapers title list for text-searchable issues at GenealogyBank($)(*)
 * Newspapers.com ($)
 * Newspaper Archive ($)
 * EBSCOhost, for American Antiquarian Society's "Historical Periodicals" collection Series 1-5
 * Historical Newspapers at ProQuest(*)
 * Gale NewsVault (*)