Most genealogists are well aware of the importance of finding a death certificate for each ancestor. However, many overlook obituaries as an equally valuable source of information. These items often provide evidence of the individual's marriage, place and date of birth, parents, siblings, and children. Many also give insight into the person's character and the events which shaped his or her life. An obituary may provide a death date and place and the cause of death, where a person was buried (especially helpful if the burial did not occur at the most recent residence), where the individual had previously lived, from what foreign place he or she had emigrated, and when the person arrived in America or at the final residence. While more recent obituaries tend to include more personal information, those of earlier times are sometimes equally extensive and even more important because they may provide such information for periods before vital records were kept.

Because of the value of establishing family connections, obituaries should be sought not only for direct ancestors but also for siblings and children. One obituary may give information which your own ancestor's and other immediate relatives' obituaries do not have. In the case of hard-to-prove lineages, seeking obituaries for other people in the same area with the same surname should not be overlooked as a possible line of research. Information found in obituaries varies widely. Each newspaper had its own policy concerning how much and what kind of information was to be included. In small towns where most people knew each other, a death was often considered highly newsworthy and a lengthy article may have been written, especially if the person was somehow involved in the town's political or social arena. At the same time, the length of the obituary often had more to do with the amount of other news which needed to be included in the small number of pages in the newspaper during the particular week or day. The placement of the article could be at any point in the newspaper where a space remained to be filled, and the obituary might appear days, weeks, or even a month after the date of death. Larger newspapers generally printed lengthy obituaries only about the area's more prominent people, in part because their families generally paid a fee to extol the deceased person's life.

Information found in obituaries often leads to research in other places. In those cases where a person died through an accident, suicide, or murder, the obituary or article may describe the death as "sudden" and may even mention that an inquest was held, in which case you might find further information in coroners' records (See "Dead Men Do Tell Tales," Ancestry, Vol. 12, No. 2). Notice of death at a place of former residence or at the residence of a child may show where to search for death and burial records in a new location, perhaps where an aged person happened to be visiting or even along a travel route. Mention of the deceased person's relatives may enable you to contact them or their present-day descendants so that you can compare and share information on the family.

If you have established the death place of an individual, an obituary should be sought in the immediate area since this is the most likely place for it to have been published. The area may have had many newspapers, some of which have long since ceased publishing. If your ancestor was an immigrant, the obituary might have been printed in an ethnic newspaper. If the individual was active in a religion, you may find the obituary in a church-sponsored newspaper. These smaller newspapers may in fact provide much more information than the larger city newspapers. Each must be searched before concluding that no obituary exits in that area, and you may wish to look in every newspaper anyway, as one version may provide more information than another. Incases where no obituary can be found in the last place of residence, looking in areas where the person's children lived may be successful.

The names and present locations of a town's local newspapers are sometimes a challenge to find. County histories and county research outlines can be very helpful. Those newspapers which are still being published are listed in Gale Directory of Publications and Broadcast Media, which describes the printing locations and correct titles of newspapers. The predecessor of this directory, the American Newspaper Directory, began publishing in 1869, so many old newspapers can be identified in older issues. Union lists of newspaper files can also help in locating newspapers which have ceased publication. See especially Clarence Brigham's History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820, Winifred Gregory's American Newspapers, 1821-1936, Anita Milner's Newspaper Indexes: A Location and Subject guide for Researchers, and the Library of Congress' Newspapers on Microfilm. Also see Betty Jarboe's Obituaries: A Guide to Sources.

In recent years, some cities and counties have indexed the obituaries in the local newspapers, making a search quite easy. These indexes may be available at your local family history center (a branch of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Family History Library), a local library, or through correspondence with the county's historical or genealogical society. You may also wish to contact the local genealogical or historical society, as it may know of indexes which have been recently compiled, some of which may still be in private hands but available on request. A few major examples of newspapers with obituary indexes include The New York Times, which has a master index that includes the years 1851 to the present and a separate Obituary Index; early Boston newspapers are indexed back to 1704; over 100 Connecticut newspapers are indexed (Hale Collection) up to 1865.