How to Find an Obituary for Free (Recent or 100 Years Old)

Where you look for an obituary depends almost entirely on when the person died. A death in the last twenty-five years usually left an obituary online, on a funeral home website or Legacy.com, and a name search will find it. A death in the 1920s or the 1950s left an obituary on newsprint that may or may not have been digitized, and finding it means knowing which newspaper to search and roughly when. This guide covers both, in order from the quickest free searches to the slower methods that work when everything else fails, and it ends with a worked example of narrowing down an unknown death date so you can go straight to the right page of the right paper.

1. Obituary or Death Notice? Know What You Are Looking For

Newspapers have printed two kinds of death announcements, and they turn up in different places. A death notice is a short, standardized listing: name, age, date of death, sometimes the address, the survivors, and the time and place of the funeral. In the 20th century these were usually paid announcements, set in small type in a column of their own, and nearly every death in a city appeared there. An obituary is a longer biographical article. In the past, obituaries were news stories written by the paper's staff about people the editors judged noteworthy; today most newspaper obituaries are written by the family or funeral home and paid for by the line or inch, and the same text is posted free on the funeral home's website.

The practical lesson is that if you cannot find an "obituary," look for the death notice. Ordinary people in big cities often got only a notice, while small-town weeklies frequently printed a full obituary for nearly everyone. Also look for the follow-up items: a "card of thanks" from the family a week later, a funeral report, or an estate notice.

2. Recent Deaths: The Free Online Sources

Legacy.com. Legacy.com hosts obituaries for newspapers and funeral homes across the country; its site says it publishes obituaries in more than 2,800 print and online publications and lists more than 12,500 funeral homes. Coverage starts at different dates for each newspaper. Some partner papers' archives on Legacy begin around 1999 or the early 2000s, others much later, so a missing result does not mean no obituary was printed.

Funeral home websites. Most funeral homes post the full obituary, service details, and a guest book on their own sites, and many keep them online for years. If you know the town, search for funeral homes there and check each one's obituary page. The death certificate, if you have it, names the funeral director.

Newspaper websites. Local papers often host their obituaries through Legacy.com, but some keep their own archive pages. Many have paywalls for news articles but leave obituaries free.

Google search operators. Search the name in quotation marks with the word obituary and a place: "Margaret Ellen Hughes" obituary Dayton. Try the maiden name, a middle name, and a nickname. Restrict to a single site with site:legacy.com "Hughes" Dayton, or exclude a common false match with a minus sign. Searching a spouse's or child's name with the word "survived" can find an obituary where the person you want is listed as a relative.

Find a Grave. Volunteers on Find a Grave often transcribe or link the obituary on the memorial page, and for deaths from a few decades ago that memorial may be the only place the text is online. Our guide to finding a grave by name for free covers Find a Grave and its alternatives step by step.

3. Library Databases You Can Use Free With a Library Card

Several of the best obituary databases are sold only to libraries, which means they cost you nothing if your library subscribes. Check your public library's "databases" or "eResources" page; many allow remote login with a card number, and some are in-library only.

• NewsBank's America's Obituaries & Death Notices, now offered by many libraries under the name HeritageHub, collects obituaries and death notices from thousands of U.S. newspapers. Coverage is deepest for recent decades, though some titles go back much further.
• ProQuest Obituaries pulls obituaries and death notices from the full runs of major papers in ProQuest Historical Newspapers, including the New York Times back to 1851, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Chicago Defender. It is strongest for the late 1800s through the mid-20th century.
• Newspapers.com Library Edition, sold to libraries through ProQuest, gives cardholders full-page access to thousands of historical newspapers. Its content can differ from the personal subscription.

State libraries sometimes license newspaper databases for every resident of the state, so check your state library's website as well as your local library's.

4. Old Obituaries: Free Digitized Newspapers

Chronicling America. The Library of Congress's Chronicling America is the largest free collection of digitized American newspapers: millions of pages published through 1963, from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It grows through the National Digital Newspaper Program, in which each state selects papers to digitize, so coverage of any one town is uneven. Use the advanced search to limit by state and date range, and search the surname alone as well as the full name, because the text was produced by OCR and names are often misread.

State newspaper portals. Many states host their own free collections, often far larger than their share of Chronicling America. A few examples:

• California Digital Newspaper Collection (UC Riverside), from California's first newspaper in 1846 onward.
• Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, run by the Colorado State Library, with millions of pages from more than 900 titles.
• NYS Historic Newspapers, with papers from all 62 New York counties, searchable or browsable by county.
• Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections (University of Illinois Library), free to search, browse, and download.
• Hoosier State Chronicles, the Indiana State Library's digital newspaper program.
• The Portal to Texas History (University of North Texas), home of the Texas Digital Newspaper Program.
• Utah Digital Newspapers (University of Utah Marriott Library), with papers from all 29 Utah counties.

Our guide to free historical newspaper archives lists more state portals and explains how to search them efficiently.

Google News Archive. Google scanned more than 2,000 newspapers before it stopped adding to the project in 2011. The papers are still online at news.google.com/newspapers, listed alphabetically with the date range for each title, but keyword search no longer works well. Treat it as a browsing tool: once you know the date of death, open the paper for the following days and read the death notices page by page.

Internet Archive. The Internet Archive hosts scanned newspapers, city directories, and obituary scrapbooks uploaded by libraries and individuals. Search the town name with "newspaper" or "obituaries" and filter by texts.

Elephind. The free newspaper search engine Elephind, which searched many digital newspaper collections at once, shut down in October 2023. It relaunched as Elephind 2.0 in late 2025 with about 30 million pages from U.S. collections and New Zealand. Check its current coverage and terms before relying on it.

5. Free Obituary Indexes on FamilySearch

FamilySearch, free with an account, has indexed obituaries from many newspapers. Through a partnership with GenealogyBank, it hosts free name indexes such as United States, GenealogyBank Historical Newspaper Obituaries, 1815–2013; the index entry tells you the newspaper and date, while the image itself sits in GenealogyBank's paid collection. Many entries were machine-indexed, so expect some errors and try spelling variations. FamilySearch also hosts state collections built by volunteers and libraries, such as Utah, Obituaries from Utah Newspapers, 1850–2005, whose images are on the Utah Digital Newspapers site. Even when an index points to a paid image, it gives you the exact paper and date, which you can then find free on microfilm or through a library database.

6. GenealogyBank and Newspapers.com: Paid, but Often Free at the Library

The two largest commercial newspaper sites are GenealogyBank and Newspapers.com. Both are subscription services; 2026 reviews list GenealogyBank at about $19.95 a month or $99 a year, and both run frequent discounts and free trials. Before you pay, check whether your library offers Newspapers.com Library Edition, and use the free FamilySearch indexes to confirm that GenealogyBank actually has the paper and date you need. If you only need one obituary, a short free trial or a library visit is usually enough.

7. Local Library Indexes, Clipping Files, and Lookup Requests

Most newspapers that were ever published have not been digitized. The paper that printed your relative's obituary may exist only on microfilm at the public library in that town or at the state library or historical society. The good news is that local libraries and genealogical societies have spent decades building obituary indexes and clipping files, often typed card files arranged by surname, and many have put those indexes on their websites.

Search the town or county name with "obituary index" to find them. If the index lists the paper and date, or if you already know the date from another source, ask for a lookup. Many public libraries will copy an obituary from microfilm and email or mail it, sometimes free and sometimes for a small fee. Send a short request with the full name, date of death (or a narrow range), town, and the newspaper if you know it. Local historical societies and genealogical societies offer similar volunteer lookups; find the society for the town in our directory of historical societies by state.

8. The Social Security Death Index: What It Tells You and What It Does Not

The Social Security Death Index (SSDI) is a name index of deaths reported to the Social Security Administration, mostly from 1962 onward, with some earlier entries. It is free on FamilySearch as United States, Social Security Death Index, which is current to February 2014, when public updates stopped.

A typical entry gives the full name, birth date, death date, and the state where the Social Security number was issued. Older copies of the index also show the ZIP code of the last residence and the ZIP code where the death benefit was sent. That last-residence ZIP is the clue you want: it tells you which town's newspaper to search. Know the limits. The SSDI is not complete, especially before the late 1960s; it does not cover deaths after early 2014; it gives the last address on file with Social Security, not necessarily the place of death; and it says nothing about cause of death, burial, or family.

9. When You Do Not Know the Date or Place of Death

Obituaries are searched by newspaper and date, so most of the work is narrowing those two things down. Work from what you know:

• Last census or directory appearance. The last year a person appears in a city directory or census gives you an earliest possible death date. A spouse listed as "widow" in a later directory gives you a latest date. Our guides to old city directories and the census explain how to find these.
• State death indexes. Many states' death indexes are free on FamilySearch and state archive sites, and they give an exact date and county.
• Grave markers. A gravestone photo on Find a Grave or BillionGraves often gives full dates. See how to find where someone is buried.
• Relatives' obituaries. A sibling's or child's obituary will say "preceded in death by" and sometimes names where survivors lived, which tells you which papers to search.
• Probate records. An estate file at the county probate court is usually opened within months of a death and names the county of residence.

Once you have a date, remember that obituaries usually ran one to five days after the death, and in weekly papers up to a week or two later. Search the hometown paper and the paper where the person died, if different, and the paper in the town where they grew up, which may have run its own notice.

10. A Worked Example: From a Name to the Printed Page

Suppose you are looking for the obituary of a grandfather, Walter Kowalski, born in 1898, who you think died "sometime in the 1970s in Ohio." This is a hypothetical case, but each step uses the free sources described above.

Step 1: SSDI. A search of the Social Security Death Index on FamilySearch for Walter Kowalski born 1898 returns a handful of matches. One shows a death in March 1974 with a last residence ZIP code in Toledo. The birth date matches what the family remembers.

Step 2: State death index. FamilySearch's free Ohio, Death Index, 1908–1932, 1938–1944, and 1958–2007 (an index from the Ohio Department of Health, without images) gives an exact date of death, say March 11, 1974, and the county, Lucas, which confirms Toledo.

Step 3: Find the paper. The Toledo Blade is the city's daily, and its full run has not been digitized. The Toledo Lucas County Public Library, however, keeps an online obituary index to the Blade and holds the newspaper on microfilm in its Local History and Genealogy department. Searching the index for Kowalski turns up an entry for March 1974.

Step 4: Ask for the page. The library will email a scan of an indexed obituary on request. If a name is not in the index, a request with the name, the date of death, and the days to check (here, March 12 to 16) gives staff or a volunteer what they need. The obituary that comes back names his parish, his cemetery, his surviving children, and the street where he lived, which is enough to start the next search.

The same pattern works for any era: use an index to fix the date and place, then go to the newspaper for that town and those days.

Tips for Finding Obituaries

• Search women under every name. Try the married name, maiden name, earlier married names, and forms like "Mrs. John Hughes," which was standard in older papers.
• Search for surnames alone. OCR errors garble first names, initials, and accented letters; a surname search limited to one paper and one week can catch what a full-name search misses.
• Read the whole death column. Death notices were often alphabetized; scan the full column for the days after the death.
• Check more than one paper. Cities often had two or three dailies plus ethnic-language and religious weeklies, each with its own notices.
• Save the full citation. Record the newspaper, date, page, and column so you, or a library, can find the item again.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I find an obituary for free?

For recent deaths, search Legacy.com, the funeral home's website, and Google with the name in quotation marks plus "obituary" and the town. For older deaths, search Chronicling America and your state's free newspaper portal, check FamilySearch's free obituary indexes, and use your library card for databases such as Newspapers.com Library Edition and NewsBank.

How do I find an obituary from years ago?

First find the date and place of death using the Social Security Death Index, state death indexes on FamilySearch, or a grave marker. Then search digitized newspapers for that town and the days after the death. If the newspaper is not online, ask the local public library or historical society to look it up on microfilm.

Why can't I find an obituary online?

Most newspapers have never been digitized, many online archives start only around 2000, and some families published only a short death notice or nothing at all. OCR errors can also hide a name that is on a digitized page. Try surname-only searches, a death notice instead of an obituary, and a microfilm lookup at the local library.

Is the Social Security Death Index free?

Yes. FamilySearch offers the Social Security Death Index free with an account. It covers deaths reported to Social Security, mostly from 1962 to early 2014, and gives birth and death dates and, in many entries, the ZIP code of the last residence, which tells you which newspaper to search.

What is the difference between an obituary and a death notice?

A death notice is a short announcement of the death and funeral arrangements, usually paid for by the family. An obituary is a longer biographical article, historically written by newspaper staff and today often written by the family. Ordinary deaths in large cities frequently appear only as death notices.