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Thursday, December 30, 2004
Hi all,
I posted the following piece in my Obitcentral group and thought it may be useful here. It is about obituary research:
I'd like to share with our new subscribers a little bit about how to look for obituaries on the web. If you know WHERE your subject deceased, you have a major advantage. Using the web, look for ALL resources for obituaries from that location.
Start with the appropriate state page at Obituary Links Page http://www.obitlinkspage.com
Then look for and document all newspapers and funeral homes that you can find from the county and surrounding counties. Start with the one that would be most likely and work down to the one that would be least likely to carry the obituary. Research all of the online obituary search engines.
Here are a few:
Obituary Central http://www.obitcentral.com
GenealogyBuff.com http://www.genealogybuff.com/obits.htm (same data but larger database)
ObitsArchive.com http://oa.newsbank.com/enter/obcent
Legacy http://www.legacy.com
All of these databases can be searched from GenealogyBuff.com simply by putting in your surname on the main page and clicking "Submit".
Another valuable resource for finding online, untranscribed obituaries is in the Historical Newspaper database at Ancestry. While they are not transcribed, they HAVE been OCR-processed...which means you can search by surname and location. You may have to scroll about the paper a bit to find the obituary but it is worth it. Of course this database costs a fee but, again, it is worth it. Search it conveniently from http://www.genealogybuff.com/newspapers.htm
Obituaries provide a valuable resource for your family tree research. So many clues in one place! Not all of them are written to the same standard. Sometimes an obit can be found in more than one newspaper; one newspaper will write a completely different version than the other. It is possible that the funeral home will have still a different version.
One more thing about obituaries...sometimes what you are looking for in your family tree has absolutely NOTHING to do with the deceased. However, an obituary can contain information about the deceased's survivors or friends which may fill in your brickwall blank!
Hope this helps.
Bill Cribbs
GenealogyBuff.com
I posted the following piece in my Obitcentral group and thought it may be useful here. It is about obituary research:
I'd like to share with our new subscribers a little bit about how to look for obituaries on the web. If you know WHERE your subject deceased, you have a major advantage. Using the web, look for ALL resources for obituaries from that location.
Start with the appropriate state page at Obituary Links Page http://www.obitlinkspage.com
Then look for and document all newspapers and funeral homes that you can find from the county and surrounding counties. Start with the one that would be most likely and work down to the one that would be least likely to carry the obituary. Research all of the online obituary search engines.
Here are a few:
Obituary Central http://www.obitcentral.com
GenealogyBuff.com http://www.genealogybuff.com/obits.htm (same data but larger database)
ObitsArchive.com http://oa.newsbank.com/enter/obcent
Legacy http://www.legacy.com
All of these databases can be searched from GenealogyBuff.com simply by putting in your surname on the main page and clicking "Submit".
Another valuable resource for finding online, untranscribed obituaries is in the Historical Newspaper database at Ancestry. While they are not transcribed, they HAVE been OCR-processed...which means you can search by surname and location. You may have to scroll about the paper a bit to find the obituary but it is worth it. Of course this database costs a fee but, again, it is worth it. Search it conveniently from http://www.genealogybuff.com/newspapers.htm
Obituaries provide a valuable resource for your family tree research. So many clues in one place! Not all of them are written to the same standard. Sometimes an obit can be found in more than one newspaper; one newspaper will write a completely different version than the other. It is possible that the funeral home will have still a different version.
One more thing about obituaries...sometimes what you are looking for in your family tree has absolutely NOTHING to do with the deceased. However, an obituary can contain information about the deceased's survivors or friends which may fill in your brickwall blank!
Hope this helps.
Bill Cribbs
GenealogyBuff.com
