Sunday, September 28, 2008

Current Obituaries by State

The ever-vigilant Jasia at Creative Gene alerts us to Michigan Daily Obituaries, which turns out to be just one member of a family of blogs that reprint a given day's obituaries from entire states at a time! For our immediate area of interest, there are:

Michigan Daily Obituaries, beginning 7 August 2008.

Indiana Daily Obituaries, beginning 11 August 2008.

Ohio Daily Obituaries, beginning 25 June 2008 but apparently not updated since 24 September.

Illinois Obituaries, beginning 24 September 2008.

I see also sites for New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and all the states northeast of them except Maine, plus Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, Georgia, and Tennessee. Not all are present: when I visited, Tennessee had no posts.

These sites are not particularly transparent; the only clue to the blogger's identity is "gh" at an incomplete profile listing only some of the sites. Nor is it clear how extensive the coverage is in a given state: a quick check of the first few 27 September entries for Illinois found reasonable distribution: Chicago, suburban, Rock Island, and Peoria. This is surely an automated system that "harvests" links to obituaries from newspaper web sites.

One noteworthy quirk: each day's entries are alphabetical by whatever part of the deceased's name came first. Researchers trying to keep up with particular surnames in particular known states should nevertheless find this a time-saving resource.

2 comments:

Jasia said...

Hey thanks for taking the ball and running with it on this one Harold. I just didn't have time to investigate it but it looked like an interesting source. I'm glad you looked into it more. Great info!

Thanks for the link!

Jasia

Harold Henderson said...

And thanks back atcha, Jasia -- who knows when I would have run across them at all if you hadn't?!