Be careful as you are searching obituaries or finding them among
personal papers that you don’t jump to conclusions. Even if
the exact town is not given, perhaps another place might be listed.
Look at these obituaries and determine what other clues are available.
From this obituary we learn not only that Alma was born in Germany
but her religious affiliation was Lutheran and she had lots of relatives
in this country.
This obituary indicated the person was born in Sweden, but where
in Sweden?
Or was this a different Sweden? Is this a town called Sweden? No
clue until this birth record was found and studies of the early
town names was undertaken.
Internet Method for Finding
Newspapers
Use the following Internet sites to accomplish
the following steps:
Ancestry.com
- Use census records here to pinpoint a place(s) where family
might have lived.
- Possibly use information on One World Tree(SM) to locate possible
places of residence.
- See if any newspaper abstracts are available for the ancestor.
USGenWeb.org
- Look the place on the state page and find county listings.
- Search for listings of the newspaper obituaries or transcripts
in the county.
- Copy and paste pertinent information into your notes.
FamilySearch.org
- Use the Ancestral File, Pedigree Resource File, or IGI to find
resident areas.
- Use the Family History Library Catalog to see if resources are
listed of published abstracts of obituaries by searching STATE-COUNTY-NEWSPAPERS
or STATE-NEWSPAPERS.
- Order the films/fiche to your local Family History Center.
- If only in book format ask www.GRAonline.com
to perform a Record Lookup of the resource for you. Ask for a
student discount.
ProQuest (Heritage Quest)
Use to search specific major big city newspapers by surname or
date.
Google.com
Search for the name of the newspaper and see if there is a newspaper
morgue online.
Here is a sample obituary from 1886 of James Abernathy.
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