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Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Obituaries

In the latest issue of Family Tree Magazine, the featured "workbook" article focused on Obituaries, written by Shannon Combs-Bennett. She did such a good job on this article that I decided to highlight some of her tips and tricks here in my blog.

Be aware that there are several types of remembrances that could be found in print.  Shannon mentions:
 
Obituary : an editorial  article written about a deceased person

Death Notice : a short announcement on the death of a person

Card of Thanks : a family announcement to thank those who offered support during grief

Shannon goes on to give a history of obituaries.  She notes that they date as far back as the 1600s. Alternative resources of information about a death include those mentioned above, and in addition, death certificates, cemetery records, funeral home records, church newsletters and club or society articles about the deceased.

Resources used to find obituaries are revealed as online indexes (which can be found through search engines such as Google), digitized and microfilmed newspapers, cemetery websites, etc.

A list of items that may be found in obituaries :

Names of the deceased
Age
birth and death dates and locations
names of spouses and children, other family members
funeral, church and cemetery arrangements

A worksheet to use when extracting information from any of the above resources is published with the article.  This can be very useful to help organize your information.

There is much more included in this article. In my opinion, Shannon has written a very good and helpful article full of ideas to help anyone in their quest to uncover information about a deceased family member.

Check out Family Tree Magazine familytreemagazine.com  A subscription to this magazine, both in print and online issues, will prove to be a very good value.