Obituaries
One of my latest research projects was to locate surviving family members of several WWII veterans. Once I found a date of death, the most reliable way to confirm I'd found the right person - and to identify any survivors - was to search obituaries of the deceased veteran and/or his wife. Looking back, some of my biggest brick-wall breakthroughs have come from finding obituaries of family members. Obituaries are unique sources in that they generally provide full life stories, complete with details and dates and names from multiple generations. FamilySearch provides a helpful summary about U.S. obituaries here: http://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/United_States_Obituaries
FamilySearch.org considered 2014 "The Year of the Obituaries." Last October they announced a partnership with GenealogyBank.com to bring information from over a billion additional obituaries online through the help of volunteer indexers. The key word here is 'index.' They do not plan to transcribe the entire obituaries, which are narrative text and consequently difficult to index.
An article in The Ancestry Insider reported on a RootsTech 2015 presentation about the FamilySearch/GenealogyBank project. Read it here: www.ancestryinsider.org/2015/02/newsbank-and-familysearch-obituary.html A good obituary certainly makes you regret missing the opportunity to know the person described.
- Here's a blog article entitled "9 of the Most Incredible Obituaries Ever Written": http://blog.funeralone.com/grief-and-healing/incredible-obituaries/
- Thanks to Dick Eastman's blog for leading us to read about Captain Donald Alexander Malcolm, Jr, who recently died "nestled in the bosom of his family while smoking, drinking whiskey, and telling lies": http://homertribune.com/2015/03/obituary-march-25/
- And here's a link to an eyebrow-raising title, "Funny Obituaries": www.legacy.com/news/notable-stories/funny-obituaries/1581/
