How to Find an Obituary (Free, Without the Paywalls)

You search a name plus "obituary" and the first results are Newspapers.com and Legacy.com. One asks for a subscription before you can read a scanned page. The other is free to read but only holds notices a family already paid a newspaper to run. Neither is where you should start.

Newspapers.com charges $7.95 a month for its Basic plan, or $44.95 billed every six months. Publisher Extra, the tier that adds papers the Basic archive does not include, costs $19.90 a month or $74.90 every six months.^[1] That is a fair price for a genealogist who will spend a year inside the archive. To read one obituary, it is a subscription you will forget to cancel.

Legacy.com works the other way around. It hosts obituary pages for partner newspapers, and reading a recent notice there costs nothing. The money changed hands earlier, when the family paid the paper to place the notice. Placement packages for national papers such as The New York Times start in the hundreds of dollars before add-ons.^[8]

For most deaths in the last two decades, the free routes below find the obituary. Recent obituaries usually live on pages that never had a paywall at all, starting with the funeral home's website.

Work in this order. Each step takes about five minutes.

• Put the name in quotes and Google it. Search "full name" plus the city plus the word died, or "full name" plus obituary plus the year. The quotes force an exact match and cut out strangers with similar names. Add the year of death if you know it, the city if you do not.
• Try the name variants. Married name, maiden name, nickname, middle initial. Peggy obituaries hide under Margaret. Women who died decades ago were often published under a husband's name, as in Mrs. John Smith.
• Search the local newspaper's own site. Google indexes newspaper obituary sections unevenly. Go to the paper's website, find its obituaries page, and use the search box there.
• Check funeral home websites. Funeral homes post obituaries on their own sites, free for anyone to read, usually with service details and a guestbook, and the pages stay up for years. If you know the town, search for funeral homes there and open each one's obituaries page. For families who skipped the newspaper, this is often the only obituary that exists.
• Search Legacy.com itself, free. Its search box covers its partner newspapers. Type the last name and the state. You only hit a wall when the notice ran in a paper that keeps its archive locked, and the library route below handles that.
• Found a paywalled snippet? Reuse the phrasing. Copy an exact phrase from the preview and search it in quotes. Obituary text gets reposted, and the same sentences often sit on a funeral home page or memorial site that never charged anyone.

If those steps fail and the death is more than 20 years old, move to the library and genealogy routes below.

Newspapers.com sells a separate product to libraries, called Newspapers.com Library Edition and distributed through ProQuest. If your public library subscribes, you search the same scanned newspaper pages free with your card, and usually from home.

Two live examples. The Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library in Indiana tells cardholders they get "free access to Newspapers.com Library Edition" to explore from home.^[2] Mid-Continent Public Library, which serves the Kansas City area, gives cardholders a login to the same database and describes 3,000+ historical newspapers running from the early 1700s into the early 2000s.^[3]

To check your own library, open its website and look for a page called Databases, Online Resources, or Research. Search that page for "newspapers." The names to look for: Newspapers.com Library Edition, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, NewsBank, and America's News. All of them include obituaries. You log in with your card number and PIN.

One honest caveat. The Library Edition is not identical to the consumer site. Mid-Continent's listing notes that the content "may differ from the personal subscription edition."^[3] For a 1958 obituary, the library copy usually has what you need. For a 2014 death, the funeral home route above is faster anyway.

No card? Library cards are free, and many systems issue them to anyone who lives, works, or studies in the area. If your library does not subscribe, ask a librarian anyway. Obituary lookups are routine reference desk work, and librarians can often pull the page from a system that does subscribe.

For deaths before the internet, two free genealogy sites do most of the work.

FamilySearch is run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which provides it "free of charge to everyone, regardless of tradition, culture, or religious affiliation."^[4] It passed 2 billion indexed records back in 2018, and its search covers death records, cemetery records, and obituary collections you can search by name, place, and year.^[4][5] Registration is free.

Find a Grave is a volunteer-built cemetery database with more than 226 million memorials across some 564,000 cemeteries worldwide, and everything on it can be viewed free without registering.^[6] A memorial is not an obituary. It usually gives you the birth and death dates, the cemetery, and often a headstone photo, and volunteers frequently paste the original obituary text into the memorial page. When a newspaper archive fails, this is regularly where the obituary turns up anyway.

Half of obituary searches are really document searches. Decide which one you need before you spend another hour.

An obituary is writing that the family or the funeral home submitted. Nobody verified it, no agency stamped it, and it has no legal force. It typically gives the death date (sometimes only the service date), plus age, hometown, survivors, career, and the funeral home handling arrangements. Every fact in it is only as reliable as the grieving person who typed it. Newspapers print what families submit.

A death certificate is the state's legal record of the death: full legal name, date and place of death, date of birth, and the certified cause of death. State and territory vital records offices issue them. The federal government does not. The CDC states plainly that it "does not distribute certificates, files, or indexes with identifying information for vital records," and it maintains the directory that points you to each state's office.^[7] Every state sets its own fees, forms, and rules about who may order a copy.

If a bank, insurer, landlord, or court asked you to prove a death, stop hunting for the obituary. They will not accept it. Order certified copies of the death certificate instead, and read what every company actually requires after a death.

Sometimes there is nothing to find. That fact means less than you fear.

An obituary is optional. No law requires one, and newspapers charge to print them. A community paper in Maine lists obituary rates at $2.50 per line, photo extra. The Los Angeles Times starts at $205 for a five-line notice, and length, photos, and extra publication days push metro prices into the hundreds fast.^[8] Families look at those numbers, in the worst week of their year, and decline. Other people die with no one positioned to write one: no close family, an estranged family, no service, no money.

An absent obituary is not a verdict on the person. It is usually a verdict on newspaper ad pricing.

If you cannot find one, look for what does exist instead: the funeral home's notice, a Find a Grave memorial, the state's death index through vital records. And if the missing obituary belongs to someone you loved, write it now. There is no deadline, and no rule says it has to run in a paper. Our guide to writing an obituary walks you through it line by line, and the free obituary maker formats the finished piece for a memorial page or for sharing. Publishing it on a funeral home tribute page or a free memorial site costs nothing.

Run it top to bottom and stop when you find the notice.

• Google the exact name in quotes, plus the city and the word died.
• The local newspaper's own obituaries page and its search box.
• Funeral home websites in the person's town.
• Legacy.com's free search.
• Your library's newspaper databases, from home, with your card.
• FamilySearch and Find a Grave for deaths before the internet.
• State vital records, when what you actually need is legal proof rather than a life story.

Total cost of that list: nothing. The paid archives are built for research projects, not for finding one person. Start free, and you will usually finish free too.