The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
Obituaries are now easier than ever to track online
This story was published Aug. 6, 2000
You've heard the old saw about the retired man whose wife brings the morning paper to his bedside each day.
He turns immediately to the obituary section. If he doesn't find his obituary there, he gets up and goes about his day.
I thought of that story a few minutes ago when I went online to www.legacy.com and used its ObitFinder search engine to search more than 1,000 newspapers.
I entered "Terence Day" and told ObitFinder to search the entire United States. Within seconds it reported "0 obits for Terence Day." With a heavy sigh I concluded that I would have to go about my evening, which includes writing this column.
Some day, ObitFinder will find an obituary for Terence Day, but I don't suppose I'll get to read it; not unless my passing is prematurely reported, as was Mark Twain's, on June 2, 1897.
The great American writer quipped, "The report of my death was greatly exaggerated," or words to that effect, and lived another 13 years.
Newspaper obituaries have been a major source of genealogical information in my research. They have provided a veritable gold mine of information.
Various relatives have clipped them, dated them and sent them to me in the mail. I've spent many an eye-wearying hour scanning microfilm of newspaper obituaries and fondling brittle, yellow old newspapers in binders in libraries and archives.
Like everything else these days, obituaries are getting computerized. Hundreds of newspapers are making obituaries available on the Web, often for free. Some Web sites offer links to dozens and dozens of newspaper obit archives.
HeavenlyDoor.com provides hyperlinks to obit pages at 140 newspapers across this broad land. From heavenlydoor.com and within a few seconds, I'd searched 9,532 obituaries published North Dakota since 1996.
I wasn't dead there, either, but rest assured that if I were, anyone wanting to know about my demise would have found my obituary.
You can find death notices published in the Herald at www.tri-cityherald.com/obits. Although full obits don't appear on line, you can browse death notices or conduct a search for specific people.
Some of the newspapers you can access through HeavenlyDoor include the Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Rocky Mountain News, Salt Lake Tribune, Deseret News, Virginia-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., Toledo Blade in Ohio, the Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Houston Chronicle.
Look for online availability of obits to grow as we increasingly evolve into a digital society in a digital age.
One of the nice things about using a search engine to browse for something like an obituary is that the darned things are infallible. If you search for Terence Day, and that string of letters is there, the computer will find it.
Ah, but there's a down side. If you are skimming over the pages the old-fashioned way, with eyes peeled for a name, you're likely to notice alternative spellings. Computer search engines are extremely fast and reliable, but the people who operate them might not be.
If you search for Terrence, Terrance or Terance, the obit search engine won't find Terence.
You cope with this by doing multiple searches with alternative spellings. It's a bit of a nuisance, but with names where the risk of spelling errors is high, it's well worth the trouble.
Just keep in mind that names are not only misspelled, but the way a person spells his or her name sometimes changes over time. At different times in her life, my Aunt Maud spelled her name Maud and at other times, Maude.
Not many newspaper databases of obituaries goes back more than a few years, but some newspapers are expanding their archival offerings by making earlier years available.
Each paper has its own way of doing things, and some offer much more than others. For instance, the Seattle Times' obituaries are available online back to 1996. Salt Lake Tribune obits are online from September 1991, but you have to subscribe to their archive service. Recent obituaries are free.
So, if you're looking for family members who died in recent years, you may be able to go online and find an obituary without leaving your home.