Since retiring at the start of this year, I’ve been working on some family history. More precisely, I’ve been trying to assemble an annotated matriarchal family tree of my mother’s family back to her great-grandmother. My mother’s family collected several banker’s boxes of genealogical and similar kinds of information. In fact, I probably have more family group sheets than I could ever know what to do with. (A favorite activity seemed to have been tracing ancestors back to Adam.)

Of all the kinds of documents I’ve been consulting and double-checking, obituaries published in newspapers and online by funeral homes have emerged as being among the most reliable; headstones are usually another good resource. This is especially true regarding the spellings of names, years of marriage, etc., not only for immediate family members but also for aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, etc., etc.

I know that preparing an obituary can be an especially emotional, stressful undertaking. (So far, I’ve written two.) And I certainly don’t want to add to the grief or anxiety of anyone tasked with writing an obituary, especially of an immediate family member. At the same time, obituaries can serve as very helpful documents used by historians not just for family histories but for all kinds of historical studies.

Continue reading Guest Post: Advice for Writers of Obituaries →