How to Find an Obituary From Years Ago for a Specific Person

To find an obituary from years ago, work backward from the death rather than forward from the newspaper. First pin down when and where the person died, as closely as you can, from a gravestone, a death certificate, the Social Security Death Index or a family Bible. Then work out which newspapers covered that town in that year and read the issues for the week or two after the death: online if the paper has been digitized, on microfilm at a library if it has not. Most obituaries that seem lost are sitting in a paper nobody thought to check, a week later than anyone looked.

Obituary requests are among the most common questions a small historical society gets, and the ones that end in disappointment usually go wrong at the first step. Someone types a name into a search box, gets nothing, and concludes there was no obituary. Here is the slower method, which works far more often.

Step 1: Pin down the date and place of death

A newspaper search without a date is a needle hunt. Even a year and a county will save you hours. These are the sources I reach for first:

Source	What it usually gives you	Where to look
Gravestone or cemetery record	Year of death, often the full date; sometimes family members nearby	Find a Grave and BillionGraves (volunteer photo indexes), the cemetery office or sexton, a church burial register
Death certificate	Exact date and place, the informant, the funeral home, the place of burial	State vital records office; older certificates are often at the state archives, and many are indexed on FamilySearch
Social Security Death Index	Birth and death dates, last residence by ZIP code	FamilySearch (free); most useful for deaths from the 1960s into the early 2010s
Probate or estate file	A close date of death, the heirs and where they lived	County probate court, or the county clerk in states without a separate probate court
Family papers	Funeral cards, Bible entries, letters, a clipping someone kept	Relatives, attics, the boxes nobody has opened
Veterans' records	Pension files, burial and service details	The National Archives (NARA), which holds older military pension and service files

Two details on a death certificate are worth more than the rest. The funeral home placed the death notice, so its town tells you which paper to search first, and if the business still exists it may have its own files. The informant, often a son or daughter, may have lived somewhere else, and families frequently sent a notice to the paper where the children lived too.

Statewide death registration began at very different times from state to state, so for an early death you may have only a town record or a church register. That is fine. A month and a township is plenty to start reading newspapers.

Step 2: Find out which papers covered the place

People assume there was one hometown paper. There rarely was. A rural death in the 1920s might have been reported by:

the weekly paper in the county seat
the nearest city daily, especially if the family had business or relatives there
the paper in the town where the person grew up, under a heading such as "former resident"
the paper where a grown child lived
an ethnic, religious or foreign-language paper, which often covered people the English-language dailies ignored
a union, fraternal or church newsletter

To learn what papers existed, start with the US Newspaper Directory inside Chronicling America, the Library of Congress newspaper site. It lists American titles by place and date and notes which libraries hold copies. Your state library or state historical society usually keeps its own list of newspapers by county, and a reference librarian at the public library in that town will know the local titles by heart.

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Step 3: Search what has been digitized, free sources first

With a date and a list of papers in hand, check what is online.

Chronicling America, from the Library of Congress, is free and strongest for older papers, roughly the nineteenth century into the middle of the twentieth.
Most states have a digital newspaper project run by the state library, the historical society or a university. Many are free and include small-town weeklies the national sites never touched.
Your public library may license newspaper databases you can use free with a library card, often from home. Ask which ones; the list is rarely advertised well.
Large subscription newspaper archives cover thousands of titles. Before paying, check the site's title list for your town and years. Some libraries and FamilySearch centers offer free access on their own computers.
For deaths from the late 1990s onward, the obituary was probably posted on a funeral home website or a newspaper's online guestbook. If the page has vanished, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine sometimes kept a copy.

Searching old newspapers is not like searching the web. The text behind each page image was produced by optical character recognition, and on faded newsprint it is full of mistakes. Our piece on OCR and handwritten text recognition explains why. In practice:

search the surname alone, limited to the place and a date range, before adding a first name
try initials ("J. W. Turner") and, for married women, the husband's name ("Mrs. John Turner")
try spelling variants and likely OCR misreadings
when a search fails, open the issues for the dates you care about and read the page images yourself

That last step finds more obituaries than any search trick. A weekly paper is only eight or twelve pages, and the death you want may be a two-line item in a village column the OCR mangled.

Step 4: Go to the microfilm

Most American newspapers have never been digitized. Many have been microfilmed, and the film usually lives at the state library, the state historical society or archives, or the public library in the town where the paper was published.

Read every issue for at least two weeks after the death. Daily papers usually ran a notice within a few days. Weekly papers might print a short notice in the next issue and a full obituary the week after, once the family had supplied the details. Look in more than one place on the page: a "Died" heading, the local news columns, the reports sent in by correspondents from outlying villages, and a "card of thanks" from the family a week or two later, which confirms the date and often names the survivors.

If the film is far away, ask your own library about interlibrary loan; some state libraries and historical societies lend newspaper microfilm. Many libraries also offer an obituary lookup service by mail or email for a date you supply. Some charge a copying fee, but a librarian with a reader-scanner and a date can usually find a notice faster than you can drive there.

Modern reader-scanners save straight to a USB drive or email, so you can come home with a clean image rather than a gray photocopy. If you want to know how those film copies were made in the first place, our guide to imaging and microfilm covers it.

Step 5: Check where obituaries ended up later

Obituaries were clipped, copied and indexed for a century before anyone put them online. Look in:

library and genealogical society obituary indexes, often card files compiled by volunteers over decades, sometimes now online
Find a Grave and BillionGraves memorial pages, where volunteers often transcribe an obituary under the photo of the stone; treat these as leads and find the original
family scrapbooks and Bibles, which are full of loose clippings with no paper name or date on them
church records, and funeral home records that some funeral homes have donated to a historical society or library
probate files and pension files, which sometimes include a clipping as proof of death

Clippings in family papers are often tiny, brittle and printed in small type. A handheld LED magnifier makes them far easier to read than squinting under a lamp, and it saves handling the paper more than you need to. When a box of family papers comes to a historical society, the clippings are usually the first thing people want found; our notes on building a collection from attic donations describe how they get sorted.

A hypothetical search, start to finish

Everything in this example is invented. Say you are looking for a great-grandfather, Walter Dunmore, who "died sometime in the thirties" in a farming county.

A volunteer's photo of his stone gives the year, 1934. The state death index narrows it to March, in a particular township. The death certificate names a funeral home in the county seat and an informant, a daughter living two counties away.

The county seat weekly is on microfilm at the state library. The issue for the week after the death has a three-line notice. The issue after that carries a full obituary inside the township correspondent's column, with his birthplace, his church and the names of five children. The daughter's local paper ran a short item too, and that one mentions a brother nobody in the family remembered.

None of that would have turned up from typing "Walter Dunmore obituary" into a search box.

When there may be no obituary at all

Not everyone got one. Infants, the very poor, people who died far from home, and many people in communities the main local paper ignored may have only a line in a death list, or nothing. Black newspapers, foreign-language papers and church publications are the places to look for people the dominant paper overlooked.

If there is truly no obituary, the newspaper may still hold a funeral report, a probate notice to creditors, a card of thanks or a mention in a court or accident report. Those can carry as much family information as the obituary would have.

Keep what you find

Write down the paper's title and town, the date, the page and the column, and save the full page image, not just a crop of the notice. You will want the context later.

Old newsprint is acidic and gets more brittle every year. Scan or photograph clippings, store the originals flat in folders, and keep them away from photographs, which the acid can stain. The resolution and file settings in our guide to digitizing old photos work just as well for a clipping. Never tape a torn clipping or laminate it.

FamilySearch (familysearch.org) is free with an account and is worth a look at every step, for death indexes, cemetery indexes and the occasional obituary collection.

Frequently asked questions

How do I find an obituary from years ago for free?

Pin down the date and place of death, then try Chronicling America, your state's digital newspaper project, your library's newspaper databases and FamilySearch. If the paper is not online, read the microfilm at a library or ask for a library lookup.

Can I find an obituary with just a name?

Sometimes, if the name is unusual. Usually you need at least a year and a county first. Gravestone indexes, death indexes and death certificates are the quickest way to get them.

Why can't I find an obituary online?

Most old newspapers have never been digitized, and the ones that have are searched through OCR text full of errors. Try browsing page images for the right dates, then microfilm.

What is the difference between an obituary and a death notice?

A death notice is a short announcement, usually placed by the family or funeral home, with the date and funeral arrangements. An obituary is a longer account of the person's life. Older papers often printed only the notice, sometimes just a line or two.

How long after a death was an obituary published?

Daily papers usually ran something within a few days. Weekly papers might take one to three issues. Look at least two weeks past the date of death, and watch for a later card of thanks or memorial.