Old newspapers: death and marriage notices

Death notices and obituaries

Early papers often printed only brief death notices in a column of deaths: a name, a date, an age, and perhaps a place, such as In this town, on the 4th inst., Mrs. Sarah Webb, aged 63. As the 1800s went on, longer obituaries became common, especially in small-town weeklies. They may give the birthplace, when the family moved to the area, church membership, military service, cause of death, and a list of surviving children with their married names and towns.

Notices use a vocabulary of their own. Relict means widow or widower, so Mrs. Ann Hale, relict of the late Amos Hale, tells you Amos died first. Consort simply means husband or wife. Aet. means aged, and dec'd means deceased.

Look for more than one item. A death might appear first as news, then as a formal notice, then as a card of thanks from the family, and later as a notice to creditors from the executor. Papers in the person's former hometown sometimes reprinted the news, so search where the family came from as well as where they died.

Marriage notices

Marriage notices usually give the date, the names of the couple, the minister or official, and often the bride's father's name or residence, as in Married, on Thursday last, by the Rev. Mr. Hall, Mr. John Price to Miss Ann, daughter of Thomas Reed, Esq., all of this county. A notice that names the bride's father can be the only record linking a woman to her parents.

Notices sometimes appeared weeks after the event, and couples from rural areas might be announced in a paper in the county seat or a neighboring town. Check several weeks of issues and nearby papers.

Inst., ult. and prox.: reading old dates

Old notices rarely spell out the month. Instead they use three Latin-based abbreviations. Inst., for instant, means this month. Ult., for ultimo, means last month. Prox., for proximo, means next month, and appears mostly in announcements of coming events.

These words are measured from the date of the issue, not from today. A paper dated March 5 that reports a death on the 27th ult. means February 27. A paper dated March 5 that reports a marriage on the 2d inst. means March 2. Always note the issue date before you work out the event date. Phrases such as Thursday last or on Monday evening also count backward from the issue date, so look up a calendar for that year.

Searching digitized papers

Digitized newspapers are searched through OCR, which is computer-read text. On old, faded, or tightly printed pages, OCR makes many mistakes, so a name you are looking for may be misread. Try spelling variants, search for a less common word that would appear in the notice, such as the town name or the spouse's name, and when you know an approximate date, simply browse the pages of that week.

Weekly papers often grouped local news into columns by township or neighborhood, written by local correspondents. These columns are full of names: who was sick, who visited, who moved away. They are hard to find by keyword, so browsing the right weeks often pays off.

What was published, and where

Before you search, find out which papers existed in your ancestor's town at the time. The Library of Congress's Directory of U.S. Newspapers in American Libraries covers papers published in the United States since 1690 and tells you which libraries hold each title, on paper or microfilm. Many papers have never been digitized, and a state library or historical society may hold the only microfilm.

Immigrant communities had their own papers in German, Swedish, Norwegian, Czech, Polish, Italian, Yiddish and many other languages. Black communities had their own papers too, which often reported events the main local paper ignored. If your family belonged to one of these communities, look for its papers.