How to track obituaries for several people

Who tracks more than one name

Keeping watch for one person is simple enough. Keeping watch for several is a different task. People do it for many reasons:

• Adult children keeping an eye on aunts, uncles and older family friends.
• People who have lost touch with relatives and would want to know.
• Alumni groups, clubs and churches that like to honor former members.
• Small businesses and professionals who serve older clients.
• Family historians following a branch of the family tree.

The goal is the same in each case. You want to hear about a death in time to respond, without spending hours every week searching.

Build a good list first

A careful list saves more time than any tool. For each person, write down what you know:

• Full legal name, including middle name or initial.
• Nicknames, maiden names and earlier married names.
• The city and state where they live now, and anywhere they lived for a long time.
• Approximate age or year of birth.
• Names of a spouse, children or siblings, if you know them.

Family names are especially useful. Obituaries almost always list survivors, so a spouse’s or child’s name is often the quickest way to confirm you have the right person. This matters most for common names.

Group names by place

Obituaries are local. They are posted by the funeral home that handles the service and by papers near where the person lived. So it helps to sort your list by town or county.

For each area, note the main funeral homes and the local newspaper. A small town may have only one or two funeral homes, while a large city can have dozens.

Remember that people move. If someone went into assisted living near a daughter, or spends winters in another state, the obituary may be posted there instead.

Checking by hand

With a list of three or four names in one area, manual checking is manageable. Set a regular time, perhaps once a week, and visit the obituary pages for the funeral homes and newspaper you noted. Search each page for the last names on your list.

The trouble starts as the list grows. Ten names spread across five states can mean dozens of websites. It is easy to skip a week, and a notice posted on a Monday may be followed by a funeral on Friday. By the next check, the service is over.

A simple spreadsheet with a column for the last date you checked each person can help you stay on track for a while.

Using free alerts

Free web alerts can take some of the load. You can create one search alert per name with the word obituary added. Our guide on using Google Alerts for obituaries explains how to set these up and where they fall short.

With many names, the gaps multiply. Some notices are never picked up, and common names can flood your inbox with results for other people. You will still need to open every alert and decide if it is the person you care about.

Using a monitoring service

A monitoring service is built for exactly this job. You add each name with the details you know, and the service checks funeral home websites, newspapers and memorial sites every day. When a new notice looks like a match, you get an email with a link to the obituary.

The Passings lets each approved user monitor up to 10 names for free. Every new account request must be approved before checks begin. Read more on the pricing page.

Whatever method you choose, review your list now and then. Update addresses when people move, add new names and remove anyone you no longer need to follow.