When you are working on a history project or your genealogy you will want to search obituaries or death notices in old newspaper articles. This little snippet of an announcement that was written usually by the funeral director from information collected from a living family member are very useful for clues on where to look next.
Secondary Evidence:
There is no doubt that this secondary evidence is often wrought with errors, misspelling, incorrect dates and even in wrong names of the parties, still they are little news items that should not be overlooked for their value in other areas.
Survivors and Next of Kin:
The names of the surviving members of the deceased are usually given, which in many cases will reveal the married names of daughters, and usually the location of residence is shown for the survivors as well.
Vital Statistics:
Sometimes you will see the age or date of birth given in these death notices and also the place of birth of the deceased might be shown. Occasionally the names of the parents of the deceased are given.
Occupations, Organizations and Military:
You might learn the occupation of the deceased, whether or not they belonged to any fraternal of social type organization, or if they belonged to the Fire Department, and one very helpful piece of information is if they had served in the military, when and what branch might be shown.
Manually Read Old Newspapers:
In years past, the only way to search for these obituaries was to go to the community that the newspaper was published in and start manually reading back issues from their newspaper morgue. You would have to know the date of death and then start looking through several days of papers until you located it.
Microfilmed Papers:
In later years, many of these old newspaper archives were microfilmed and made available to be read at libraries or through inter-library-loan to scroll through the film and attempt to locate the death notice.
Computer Age:
Now in the wondrous age of computers and the Internet you are able to subscribe to an account at Newspaper Archive and locate these obits almost instantly even if you do not know the community where it would have been published or even if you do not know the date of death. Those millions of rolls of microfilmed old newspapers have been scanned and digitized and made computer readable with Optical Character Recognition software.
World’s Largest Newspaper Collection:
There is no better bargain anywhere on the web to be able to obtain so much information in such a short time and with such ease. We encourage you to visit the Newspaper Archive information page and do some keyword searches. You will be amazed at how much information is available right at your fingertips.
Visit the world’s largest collection of old newspapers and search obituaries.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
This is all very informative, but what if a person knows the date of death, but not the name. For example, I am currently searching the furthest reaches of the internet for the obituary of my step-mothers biological grandmother. My step-mother was adopted and the agency will not give us contact information for her biological family. All we know is ther her biological grandmother was killed in a car accident on August 1, 1960 in NOrthern Utah. We do not know her name, and I have searched the internet for months, with no luck at all. So you see, even with these new search engines, the research is far from “easy”.
Your case is a perfect example of one that “might” have success with a NewspaperArchive subscription.
They do have a browse feature where you can read newspapers by date. There are two sets of newspapers from Provo, Utah that cover the 1960 date you mention, so it should be worth a subscription. It would seem that auto accidents with fatality should be fairly easy to find.
If you are not able to find what you seek you might want to consider engaging a professional researcher from Salt Lake City that will know how to access newspapers that have not yet been digitized.