Fra Noi Embrace Your Inner Italian
I have a lot of very distant cousins. They are so distant that I never met them, yet they are in my family tree. I have closer cousins that I do not hear from, and there are people who have left our family due to divorce. Roughly once a year, I search to see if any of these people have passed away, so I can update my tree, and visit the grave or crypt if possible.
Among all the sources we use, the death notice (sometimes called “obituary”) is a common resource and relatively inexpensive.
Today, more notices are posted on funeral home websites, which are part of the “package” and cost nothing to search on Google.
I’m sure that most of you are very familiar with the information we can find in a death notice, such as:
- Name of the deceased
- Names of surviving relatives, possibly including maiden names
- Names of predeceased relatives, possibly including maiden names
- Often the name of cemetery where they will be buried or entombed or inurned
- Possibly the date and place of death
- Sometimes the date and place of birth
Unlike a death certificate, you don’t have to pay $17 for a copy. You need to either subscribe to a newspaper archive website, or you use one for free at a public library or a FamilySearch center. Even if you pay a subscription for a newspaper website to use at home, you can look up as many death notices as you want.
There is no one place to simultaneously search both newspapers and funeral home websites. You use the newspaper site to search its holdings, and you use Google to search funeral home sites.
As prices went up and funeral home websites offered a place to post biographical details without charging by the word, the notices became more detailed and listed more relatives. More importantly, people could put stories and personality traits that never appear in a newspaper notice. Plus, they give the rest of us a place to comment and tell stories about the deceased, which the newspapers certainly do not do. Lastly, most funeral home websites show the birth and death dates, which the newspapers almost never do unless you pay to show it in the text.
There are several schools of thought on how you should search for a death notice/obit. Not every death notice has the same format. You could have ones that start like this:
“Robert Johnson, beloved husband of Gloria, father of Bobby Jr. and Veronica”
“Robert Johnson, beloved husband of Gloria (nee’ Antonucci), father of Robert (June) and Veronica (Edward) Barletta”
“Bob Johnson, beloved husband of Gloria, father of Bobby Jr. and Roni”
These would all be for the same person and family, but you can see the subtle differences.
The family can choose to use as much or as little detail as they want to. They can list maiden names of every female. They could list the deceased parents of Robert. They could list the children’s married names. Since each family decides how much to list, you may need to use multiple search methods to find the notice.
When you’re combing either resource, don’t forget the two possibilities: someone passed away and they did not place a death notice or obituary in a newspaper or at a funeral home website. And the obvious possibility that no one passed away in that family yet.
The trick is that you want to find your specific family, using combinations of names. If you just search for Robert Johnson, for one thing you’ll find web pages about the old blues singer. But you might find dozens of Robert Johnsons who are not your cousin twice removed. You should use the deceased’s full name, and his wife’s maiden name.
“Robert Johnson Gloria Antonucci”
That search would probably eliminate all the blues singer sites, and if Gloria or their children choose to list her maiden name, it is not very likely that there are a dozen Robert Johnsons who passed away who happen to all be married to a dozen different Gloria Antonaccis.
If you search for Robert and mention Antonacci, and the family chose to not put her maiden name in the notice, you will not find Robert’s notice. So I have an alternate method you can try. Search for all the first names, plus the surname.
“Robert Johnson Gloria Veronica beloved” (The son Robert won’t help the search because his dad Robert is already there.)
Because Johnson is such a common name, you could find multiple families, but the family has to have all those people to get the google hit.
I also added the word “beloved.” This is to try to narrow down the results to just death notices and obituaries. If I left that word off, there might be newspaper pages of thousands of marathon runners that contain a Robert, a Gloria, a Johnson and a Veronica on the page, but it won’t be a death notice for Robert.
I have to complicate things by talking about people that predeceased the person you are looking for. Robert Johnson’s parents both died before he did, and so did his brother Frederick and sister Carla. The family can choose to omit the people who predeceased Robert, which means you might not find Robert’s notice if you also search for his parents and siblings.
So to summarize, I suggest you try the following search methods.
Method 1: Search for as many full names including maiden names, children/sibling married surnames, plus the word “beloved”
Method 2: Search for the surname, and the first names of the spouse and each child without their surnames, plus the word “beloved”
I would suggest you use the formal names rather than nicknames. If her name is Becky, search for Rebecca. Michael rather than Mike.
Basically, the more common the surname, the less likely you’ll find the right family.
So with all that in mind, let’s go back to the pieces of information you can find.
Typically most newspaper death notices do not show either the birth or death date but the funeral home sites often show both.
Of course, both newspaper and funeral home sites are supposed to list the final resting place, but many families say “Private” nowadays, which doesn’t tell us anything. When I find “Private,” I first check Find-A-Grave, and if that fails, I check Catholic Cemeteries of Chicago. Find-a-grave might show that the person was cremated and has not final resting place. Catholic Cemeteries kiosks can only help if the person died in Chicagoland and were Catholic.
Most notices list all surviving descendants, parents and siblings. Grandchildren may not always be named, and are rarely linked to their parents. So you get a list of 21 grandchildren without surnames, you might not know who they each belong to. You may also get “Grandfather of 21” and no names at all.
Many notices list ONLY surviving siblings, not all of them. If you are sure you have found the right family, you may figure out that Uncle Vito and Aunt Agata had passed away before Uncle Giovanni. Now you look for the two who passed away earlier. You might also get a notice that lists “brothers Luigi, Giuseppe, the late Vito, the late Angelo” so if you didn’t know they had died, you can look for them too.
Lastly, on the funeral home sites, people can post their condolences and thoughts, and you might get a little genealogy, and a lot of personality, of the person who died.
So with all this in mind, when you create a death notice or obituary, put as much information as you can. We don’t know how long these funeral home websites will keep their old obituaries up, but a genealogist can find them years later and get a lot of info and a decent profile of someone who has gone.
