How to find obituaries in a city or county

Why a local search plan helps

Sometimes you are not looking for one person. You may want to keep up with deaths in your hometown, follow notices in a county where you do business or check an area where you lost touch with friends. Other times you are looking for one person but only know the area where they lived.

In both cases, a plan built around the place works better than random searching. Once you know which funeral homes, papers and websites cover an area, you can check them quickly and trust that you are not missing a major source.

Draw the area

Start by deciding how wide your search should be. People often use funeral homes and papers outside their own city limits, so a strict boundary can leave gaps.

• The city or county itself.
• Nearby towns that share the same newspaper.
• Towns just across a county or state line, if they are close by.
• For a county, the county seat and any larger town nearby where many services are held.

A simple map with a circle around the area helps. Write down the town names inside it, since you will use them in searches later.

List the funeral homes

Funeral homes post most notices first, so they form the core of your plan. Make a list of every funeral home that serves the area, along with the web address of each one’s obituaries page.

Add any funeral homes in nearby towns from your map as well.

Also note cremation providers and funeral homes that serve particular faiths or cultural groups in the area. They may post notices that the larger funeral homes do not.

List the local papers

Next, add the newspapers that cover the area. In a city, this is usually the main daily paper. In a county, it may also include one or more weekly papers that serve smaller towns.

• The daily paper and its online obituaries section.
• Weekly or twice-weekly town papers.
• Community, faith and language newspapers.
• Local news websites and radio station sites that post death notices.

In some small towns, a local radio station or a community social media group shares news of deaths quickly. These are worth noting too, even though they are less formal. Our guide on searching newspaper obituaries has tips for each kind of paper.

Use memorial sites as a catch-all

Large memorial websites collect notices from many funeral homes and papers. Most let you filter by state and city, and some by date. This makes them a useful catch-all for notices you might miss on your own list.

Filter by your city first. Then check each nearby town from your map, since the filter may only match the exact city name given in the notice.

Be aware that a notice may be listed under the town where the person lived, the town where they died or the town where the service was held. These can all be different. Someone who lived in a small town but died in a city hospital may appear under either one.

Memorial sites are a good backup, but they are not a full substitute for your list. Some funeral homes and small papers do not share their notices with these sites at all.

Set a checking routine

With your lists ready, decide how often to check. Most notices stay up for a while, so you do not need to check every hour. Pick a rhythm that fits your needs.

• Keep your list of links in one place, such as a bookmark folder.
• Check the funeral homes first, since they post fastest.
• Then check the papers, and finish with a memorial site search for the area.
• Sort each site by newest first, and stop when you reach notices you have already seen.

Review your lists every few months. Funeral homes open, close and change names, and papers merge or move their obituaries to a new website. A link that worked last year may now lead to an empty page or an old list.

Let the notices come to you

A local plan works well, but it takes time, and the list of funeral homes can be long in a large county. If you are watching an area for specific people, an obituary monitoring service can check funeral homes, newspapers and memorial sites each day and email you when a matching name appears. Our guide on obituary alerts for a city covers more ways to follow one area.