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.

All things Michigan and Polish

That's Jasia's long-running blog Creative Gene. Whether she's hosting a blog carnival about contacting living relatives, mulling over whether to renew her local genealogical society membership, persuading her brother to get a DNA test, or giving us a snapshot of Detroit in 1908, this is a Midwestern genealogy blog worth keeping track of (you can get it by email).