Free Obituary Search Tips - How to Find Obituaries Online Without Paying a Dime!

Trying to find public records, like an obituary listings, can be a trying process if you are not familiar with where to look, or what resources are available. Here are some places to get started:

Newspaper obituaries

There are a couple of options on how to search for a newspaper obituary. Going to different newspapers or libraries to look at microfilm, is a little unreasonable. In the late 90's, most newspapers started to digitize their obituaries, so that they can easily be found on the newspapers home site. However, the archives are often limited in dates. Most newspaper home sites do not have any obituaries listed prior to the late 90s.

Libraries and Universities have wonderful online archives that are comprised from several resources. There you will find a search engine with multiple listings for old and new obituaries.

Then there are online search portals like Ancestry.com. that provide a one stop shop. Search portals will automatically redirect you to other sites. You will not have to type each site into your browser. The National Obituary Archive has over 55 million obituary entries, making it one of the largest newspaper obituary archives.

Genealogy Banks

The LDS church has one of the largest genealogy record databases in the world. Genealogy records provide: birth dates, death dates, and family history information. Be careful here, the spelling must be exact. It is completely free to search. The dates are not limited. The LDS records have listings as far back as people have been able to trace their genealogy.

There are multiple other genealogy banks, but most of them draw their information from the LDS site, or newspapers.

Social Security Death Index

Search engines like Locate Records.com or Roots web provide you with a tool to search by name or social security number. If you use a name, the site will list all the people by that name, their state, death, birth, SS#, and where the info was retrieved from. The Search is free, but to order the record carries a small fee. Most of these are using the Social Security Death Index, which only has records after the 60s.

These should get you off to a good start for an online obituary search.