When an old friend has died, you may wish to find word of it in a local newspaper. Obituaries are designed to convey the achievements and accomplishments of the deceased, as well as a sense of who he was and how he approached life. That can be an invaluable part of the grieving process, especially if you weren't in touch with your friend in recent years. Obituaries can also put you in contact with your friend's next of kin, and find out where to make donations in his name. Legacy.com is a free Internet service that searches North American newspapers for obituaries. To use it correctly, however, you may need to do a little detective work.
Instructions
1. Find your friend's full name. Most obituaries are published using the deceased's married name, which you may not be familiar with if you have been out of touch for a while.
2. Find out where your friend died. Unless she was a figure of some note, the obituary will usually only appear in the local newspaper or perhaps the newspaper closest to her birthplace. Check public records to find out which newspapers were published closest to her. They will aid in the search.
3. Determine when your friend passed on. It needn't be the exact day, though the more accurate you can be, the easier the search becomes. You can conduct searches by year or even by decade, but you may need to sift through a lot of names to find that of your friend.
4. Log on to legacy.com. With it, you can conduct obituary searches through more than 700 newspapers in the United States and Canada. The search engine is on the right-hand side of the home page. There is no cost to conduct the search and you don't need to sign up for anything.
5. Type in as much information as you have learned: full name, state, local newspaper, and/or date of death. If you don't know your friend's married name, you can search by newspaper. When you have entered all the information you have, click "search."
6. Scan the names provided for that of your friend. Ideally, Legacy.com will return the precise name on the first try. If you have more limited information, it will provide a number of additional names. Look for your friend's first name and the year of birth, if possible. Those are the pieces of information you are most likely to have, and they can be the best guides to finding the right obituary on the list.
7. Click on the name of your friend when you find it. Legacy.com provides the complete text of the obituary as published in the pertinent newspaper.
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