A Fast and Easy Way to Find Obituary Records Online

A very old tradition in our country is to post obituaries in a newspaper when a person passes away. Typically, they are written by a family member or friend who knew the person well throughout their entire life. It is a bittersweet article, as it is under hard and somber circumstances, however, it is usually written in celebration of the person’s life, and can provide a lot of insight into who the person actually is and how they lived their life. Unfortunately, if you want to search for the obituary records, it is not an easy task, unless you know the right place to search.

Some people even write their own obituaries. They foresee that the family member or friend will be going through a very hard time, so they try to make it easy on them by providing some key information about their life. They also are insightful enough to know that sometimes just deciding who will be writing the obituary is a point of contention among family members, and they want to avoid that, so they provide their obituary ahead of time.

Typically they are published through the local newspaper where the person used to live. There are many occasions, however, in which the family wants to publish it in a different place. For example, if a person moved away from the area in which they were born, the family may decide to publish it in the newspaper local to where the person was born instead of where they actually lived most of their life.

This makes it very hard to track down someone’s obituary record. As more and more media is moved to online resources, it actually is becoming easier, but the problem is that most newspapers still don’t allow their obituary section to be indexed by the search engines, so searching many online papers at once isn’t possible through a common search engine.

Instead, there are databases that index the obituaries and allow for them to be searched by anybody who is interested in finding them. They also hold a record of all of the death records that are publicly available, so you can view those in addition to the obituary. It is a nice combination – you can learn who the person was by reading their obituary, then learn about their place of birth, where they lived, and the details of their death from their death record. These sites typically allow you to perform a limited search for free.