Finding an Obituary Online

Obituaries are one of the cremation services offered in Wirtz, VA. While the obituary may be published in a local newspaper, now it will also be published online at the funeral home’s website and may be published in other places online as well. 

Some people do both an obituary for their loved ones at the funeral home, which is then published on the funeral home’s website, and then they create a permanent obituary that they self-publish somewhere else on the internet. Additionally, many families are now digitizing the old obituaries of their relatives to make it easier for family members who are trying to put together the family’s history. 

With really old obituaries, local libraries are still the best resource for finding what you are looking for, especially when you’re researching family history. Many local libraries have newspaper archives that are 100 years or older. 

So, what are the best tools for finding someone’s obituary? 

If you know the town and state where the deceased person died, then the local newspaper’s website is a good place to begin the search for their obituary. However, while many newspapers have placed their archives online, if the obituary you are looking for is more than a few months old, it will very likely cost you to get access to the newspaper’s archive of obituaries.   

This is, sadly, necessary because print newspapers have almost vanished, and to remain financially viable, they’ve had to begin charging for online access to unlimited articles, as well as archived articles. Most of the fees are nominal, but you should be prepared to pay if you want access. 

An additional paid resource that allows you to search all newspapers, with some archives dating back to the 18th century, is www.newspapers.com.   

Another great resource for finding obituaries online is www.legacy.com. The huge Legacy database has 20 years of obituaries from around the world, including the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Australia. There are detailed search criteria that you can specify to search Legacy’s database. 

You can get as specific as date of death, location, and name, or you can look for general phrases or keywords to locate the obituary you are looking for. Legacy also lets you narrow down your search for obituaries by country. 

Many genealogy websites have digitized obituary information as well. The most well-known of these, www.ancestry.com, has a lot of historical records, including obituaries, that have been digitized, making this a great resource for people doing research on their family histories. Although Ancestry offers a two-week free trial, after two weeks, there is a subscription fee to use Ancestry, with different pricing structures for different levels of access. 

Obituary information can be found on Ancestry using the “Birth, Marriage & Death” option on the Search menu. Like Legacy, you can enter different types of criteria to narrow your search for the information you are looking for. 

Another genealogy site that has a treasure trove of obituaries is www.myheritage.com. Like Ancestry, MyHeritage offers a free two-week trial, after which a subscription fee must be paid to continue using the site. 

If you want free searching for obituaries, Google is actually a good place to start. If you have the person’s name, date of death, and location (city and state) where they died, then you would use that as your search criteria. If the death was in the last 10-15 years, you’ll very likely be able to find some or all of the meaningful obituary, at no charge, online. 

For additional information about obituaries and cremation services in Wirtz, VA, our caring and knowledgeable staff at Lynch Conner-Bowman Funeral Home can assist you. You can visit our funeral home at 140 Floyd Ave., Rocky Mount, VA, 24151, or you can call us today at (540) 483-5533.