How to find an obituary

Where obituaries are published

There is no single national register of obituaries. A notice is written by the family or the funeral home and then published in one or more of four places, often in this order:

• The funeral home's website. Almost every funeral home in the United States posts an obituary page for each service it handles, usually within a day or two of the death. It carries the service times, the guestbook and often the photos.
• The local newspaper. Paid death notices and editorial obituaries run in the town's paper and on its website. Many papers syndicate their notices to Legacy.com.
• Memorial platforms. Legacy.com, Find a Grave, Dignity Memorial, Tribute Archive, Echovita and Ever Loved collect notices from newspapers and funeral homes, or let families post directly.
• Archives. For older deaths, Newspapers.com, GenealogyBank and library microfilm hold the original printed notice.

Because the same notice can appear in several of these places, or in only one, the reliable approach is to search all of them at once. That is what the search on this site does: it runs one query across the open web and groups the results with the dedicated obituary sites first.

Step 1: search the full name

Type the person's full name into the search box exactly as it would appear in a notice: first name and surname, with a middle name or initial if you know it. Obituaries usually use the formal first name (Robert, not Bob), so try the formal name first and the nickname second.

For a woman who married, search the married surname first and the maiden name second. Many notices print both, as in Mary (Kowalski) Johnson, so a search for either surname can find it.

Step 2: add the place

If the name is common, add the city or the state. A search for James Miller alone returns thousands of unrelated notices; James Miller Dayton Ohio narrows it to a handful. Use the town where the person lived in their last years, which is usually where the funeral home and the newspaper are, rather than where they were born.

If you are unsure of the town, the county or the state is still worth adding. Notices almost always name the state.

Step 3: read the result at its source

Each result on this site is a link to the page that published the notice. Open it there. The source page has the parts a search snippet cannot show: the full text, the service date and location, the guestbook where you can leave a message, and the photos the family chose. If the notice was syndicated, the funeral home's version is usually the most complete and the most current.

When nothing turns up

A blank result does not mean there is no obituary. Work through these in order:

• Check the spelling of the surname. One transposed letter hides a notice completely. Try the common variants (Smith and Smyth, Schmidt and Schmitt, Nguyen and Nguyễn).
• Try the nickname, the middle name or the maiden name. Some people were known by their middle name for their whole life, and the notice follows suit.
• Drop the place. The notice may name a neighbouring town, the county seat, or the town where the funeral home is rather than where the person lived.
• Wait a few days. If the death was in the last 48 hours, the notice may not be online yet. Funeral homes usually post within 1 to 3 days; newspapers within a week.
• Search the funeral home directly. If you know which funeral home handled the arrangements, its website has a searchable obituary list, and it is the first place a notice appears.
• Consider that there may be no notice. Obituaries are optional and cost money in most newspapers. Some families choose not to publish one, or publish only a brief death notice with the name, the date and the service details.

Finding older obituaries

Notices from before the mid 2000s were printed but rarely put online by the newspaper itself. Three routes work:

A search on this site reaches the pages those services have made public, so an older notice with an indexed page can still show up here. When it does not, the library route is the one most people forget and the one that most often works.

What an obituary tells you

Beyond the date of death, a typical obituary names the date and place of birth, the parents, the spouse and children, the siblings, the career, and the funeral or memorial arrangements. For genealogy that makes it one of the richest single documents about a person. Read it critically all the same: obituaries are written by grieving relatives, and dates, spellings and even the number of siblings are sometimes wrong.

Frequently asked questions