An obituary is a notice of death that is usually posted by family, friends, or the deceased person’s church. They are most often brief biographies of their life and the loved ones they have left behind. Obituaries have been placed inside of newspapers for decades, though recently more and more are being found online in legacy spaces created solely for that purpose. People find having an obituary to look back on is soothing in their time of grief and loss, and it’s understandable if you want to find someone’s obituary for these reasons. However, it can be tricky to do if you’ve lost the newspaper clipping or weblink it was originally posted in. The internet has made everything easier, and that goes for the ability to find someone’s obituary, too. The obituary app MyObits streamlines the process of finding an online obituary, and there are other resources to help you find an obituary digitally or in print, as well.
Online Obituary Search
Online obituary search engines have grown recently to help loved ones or interested parties to find someone’s obituary. Most of these services require a credit card to unlock all of the information, but there are free searches you can do on some of them to at least see portions of it.
The way they typically work is by entering target information into a list of questions – first and last name, date of birth, date of death, birth state, and death state, etc. The more questions that you can answer the more likely you are going to find a match, and be able to narrow your search (you’ll be surprised to see how many people share the same name and are in the same state!).
If you are trying to find someone’s obituary but are missing some of the important information to execute an efficient search, such as their birth date, death date, or especially the state they died in, one resource that many people find useful is with a supplementary search of an online family tree and ancestral site. These have grown even more popular over the years than the online obituary search engine, and even if you have lost contact with family over the years, chances are that someone in your lineage has accessed one of these sites and built a family tree profile. You can enter your own name and any other names and dates of family members you know into these sites and find a tree. Chances are good that they will have the dates and states listed that you need to then flesh out your original online obituary search.
Searching Newspaper Archives To Find Someone’s Obituary
Searching newspaper archives to find someone’s obituary is an extremely time-consuming, not to mention, tedious process. The internet has made it a little easier than the days of old, but not by much. That’s because newspapers do keep hold of their obituary archives – well, some do, but usually for only a limited amount of time – but their online archives can only be accessed, in most cases, if you have a paid subscription. Your other option is to go to a public library and look through that giant machine that rifles through newspaper archives, and look to others like you’re starring in a 1980s era suspense-thriller movie. That library will need to be in the same city that the newspaper is published in, in most cases, as well.
Instead of buying several newspaper subscriptions or traveling miles on the off chance that you’ll find what you’re looking for at the library, an online obituary app can do much of that leg work for you. An obituary app will typically work out a deal with newspapers across the country to gain access to their online obituary archives. That puts hundreds of databases into one place and at the tip of your fingers. Unfortunately, the fact is, there are thousands of newspapers out there, and there is no one online obituary site that has access to all. Your chances are better for this method if you’re trying to find someone’s obituary who died in a large city and not a small town.
Church And Club Records
To find someone’s obituary, you stand a good chance of success if they belonged to certain churches or clubs. It helps to know the specific location of these organizations, however, as individual meeting places will generally have their own information, websites, directories, etc. But churches will often post notices of a member’s death, including their obituary, and so will certain clubs – like the Elks Lodge, Masonic lodges, veterans groups, labor unions, etc. If they don’t have a web presence to keep an online obituary to view, you could try calling or emailing them. These close friends and associates of the deceased were likely present at the funeral and can direct you on where to find the obituary. And, speaking of funerals, if you know the funeral home that handled the deceased person’s body and services, it’s extremely likely that they have a website with the online obituary posting you are looking for.
If the person was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon Church, your search will be the easiest. The Mormon Church keeps an extensive record of millions of its members, including obituaries, at their Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. You can find information about the possibility of having them send you records at their Church of Latter-Day Saints website.
MyObits Obituary App
Of course, the easiest solution would be if people posted obituaries in one place online. That’s what MyObits has created. MyObits can be used to send death announcements and funeral info privately or publicly through SMS messages and social media. You can write obituaries, share funeral information, as well as send flowers and condolences all through their easy-to-use app services. An obituary helps you to remember your loved one but struggling to find it only gets in the way. Search their database or create an obituary today at MyObits.com.
