Obituary Time

I was looking up some of the obituaries of people I used to know. A few were surprising, just Googling people I used to know, to find out they'd died. Then a few were ones of people I knew died, but I wanted to see what information there was, since I didn't clip the newspaper.

I notice, just looking around the internet, that obituaries seem to be big business. That would be thanks to our interest in genealogy. It looks like you (or someone) can take an obituary and republish it at your own website, put ads around it, and no one is the wiser. I saw the same obituary at a couple or a few different places.

Some of the ones I was interested in were in an online archive of old newspapers. The problem with the old newspaper site is that, even if they have a billion pages, there's still enormous gaps because there's so many places that aren't on there. And it's hard to search and find something, because the old microfilms don't make reliably searchable files.

Still, if you are diligent, and lucky, you can find some amazing things, not only about the dead people you know but lots of others. I like some of the old, old articles. They've been dead forever, but if you're lucky you can look at an earlier newspaper in the archives and find the story telling about their birth.

Obituaries never go out of date. The information, if it was right in the first place, remains right forever. They had your service at 2 p.m. at such and such funeral home. Etch it in stone.