Finding Obituaries and Death Records

Death records often hold the most family information of any document. Here is where to find certificates, obituaries and indexes, and how to read them carefully.

2 min read

A death is usually the best-documented event in a person's life. A single death record can give you a birth date, birthplace, parents' names, spouse, occupation and burial place. An obituary can add the names of every surviving child, where each one lived, and clues to the family's church and hometown. That makes death records the best place to start working back from a known person.

Start with the death certificate

Once a state began statewide registration, usually somewhere between 1900 and the 1920s, a certificate was filed for nearly every death. Certificates typically list:

• Date, place and cause of death
• Date and place of birth
• Father's name and birthplace, and mother's maiden name and birthplace
• Spouse, occupation and usual residence
• Burial place and funeral home
• The informant: the person who supplied the personal details

Many older certificates are free to view on FamilySearch or state archive websites. More recent ones are ordered from the state vital records office, and privacy rules vary by state. Your state guide links to both.

Read the informant line first

The death itself was recorded by a doctor who was there, so the date and cause are usually reliable. But the birth date and parents' names came from the informant, often a grieving spouse or child, or sometimes a neighbor or hospital clerk. A son might not know his grandmother's maiden name. Treat everything the informant supplied as a clue to confirm, not as proof.

Finding obituaries

Obituaries became common in small-town papers from the late 1800s on, and they can be remarkably detailed. To find one:

1. Get the exact death date from the certificate or gravestone. Obituaries usually ran within a week or two.
2. Search digitized newspapers. Chronicling America is free; Newspapers.com and GenealogyBank are the largest paid collections. Search by surname plus town, and try nicknames and initials ("J.W. Miller").
3. Check more than one paper. Look in the hometown paper and in the paper where the person grew up. Families often sent notices to both.
4. Ask a library. If the paper isn't online, the public library in that town may have it on microfilm, and many will look up an obituary for a small fee or for free.

Other death sources worth checking

• Social Security Death Index: a free index of deaths reported to Social Security, mostly from 1962 onward. It gives birth and death dates and last residence.
• Social Security applications (SS-5): the form a person filled out themselves when they applied for a number. It names both parents and can be requested from the Social Security Administration.
• Funeral home records: many funeral homes still hold their old ledgers, often with family details.
• Church burial registers and cemetery records. See Cemetery Research and Reading Gravestones.