welcome to the ancestral findings podcast if you are looking for old obituaries in
online newspaper databases you are doing excellent genealogical research this is
a wonderful technique for finding important information on those elusive ancestors here
are some tips on finding the obituaries if they don't immediately appear as well as tips on
fact-checking them for accuracy before adding the information in them to your family tree
old newspapers are an excellent source for finding obituaries of our ancestors as any genealogist
knows these obituaries are wonderful sources of information about our long gone relatives
usually every now and then you will find a simple death notice with only a name age and maybe the
name of a parent parents or spouse now even that can be helpful if you did not previously
have the information or know the person existed those death notices simple though they may be
can alert you to known children or spouses of ancestors however most old obituaries have at
least a little more family information in them than that you can use that information to fill
out quite a bit about your ancestors in their lives on your family tree however you first
have to find the obituary and then you have to fact-check the information in it just because it
was printed in a newspaper does not mean it was true even our venerated ancestors were not above
embellishing the facts to make a family lineage sound more illustrious and sometimes they simply
did not have the information necessary to build a detailed obituary for someone so old obituaries
are essential genealogical research tools however you have to find them first and then fact check
them to be sure they are correct here are some tips on how to do both finding the old obituaries
locating an old obituary in an online newspaper database may seem like a simple thing and it
usually is you just type in a name maybe with a date or date range and a location and you will be
presented with the obituary of the ancestor you were researching that is usually how it will go
when searching for old obituaries if they exist sometimes they simply never existed and you will
not find them no matter what search techniques you but this is the exception rather than the rule
sometimes though you know there should logically be an obituary and you know the correct name date
range and location and are still getting nothing here's what to do to conduct a more productive
search search the names of other relatives if you know the names of an ancestor spouse or children
or even their siblings or parents try searching for those names instead those names might have
been included in the obituary as survivors or as people who pre deceased the individual in question
the names will show up in an online database search even if they are merely included in an
obituary and not the subject of one and this will allow you to find the obituary of your ancestor
just be sure you get the date range and location correct when searching this way search initials
it was common for people to go by their initials in public in the old days especially for men while
their family may have used their first or mental names in private the public knew men by their
initials and therefore it would not have been uncommon for initials to be used in an obituary
after all that is how the public knew them and the family already would know the person that died so
initials were a good way to let the public know as well search husbands names when looking for wives
it was the norm for women to be known publicly as mrs. husbands first and last name in the old
days much as it was common for men to be known by their first and middle initials if you cannot
find a woman by her given name try searching using her husband's name you may find her obituary under
mrs. husband's first and last name in fact it was so common for women to be known this way in
generations past that the woman's first name may not appear anywhere in the obituary at all search
a date range and location using only a first or last name maybe your ancestor had a first or same
that was unusually spelled often misspelled or was spelled phonetically in several different ways if
an obituary was being dictated to a newspaper worker they could have misspelled the name the
family may have even spelled the name a number of different ways and if they sent in a written
obituary it may not be spelled the way you expect by searching a date range and location along with
only the first or only the last name whichever was more likely to be spelled correctly you
have a better chance of finding the obituary for which you are searching fact-checking the
obituaries once you have found the obituary you want you have to fact-check it to make sure it
is accurate before putting the information in your family tree you want your genealogy to be correct
after all as an example of how families may have embellished obituaries to make the lineage seem
more distinguished my own family tree has a branch with a surname Lee generations of the family have
been told they are descended from robert e lee of civil war fame even distant cousins i've never
met but have connected with online have grown up hearing this rumor a study of miley line decades
ago revealed no known robert e lee connection but i found the source of the rumor in the 1904
obituary of my great-great-great grandmother whose maiden name was lee her surviving husband
put it in the obituary that she was a robert e lee descendant even though she was not he likely
did it because he was a prominent man in his community and wanted to seem even more elevated
because of the supposed lineage of his late wife besides studying an entire family line you can
also fact check birth death and marriage dates in an obituary by looking at census and vital
records other old newspaper articles and even family bibles just do your due diligence on any
information given in an old obituary and you can be sure you are putting accurate information on
your family tree thanks for listening to the ancestral findings podcasts for free resources
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