Telegram Obituaries: What They Are and Why They Matter
Telegram obituaries have become a widespread practice across many countries, particularly in Eastern Europe, parts of Africa, and Southeast Asia. When someone dies, their family or community members post an announcement on Telegram channels, groups, or public channels. This replaces newspaper notices in places where print media is either declining or inaccessible. The format is usually straightforward: a photo of the deceased, name, date of birth, date of death, and sometimes a brief message or prayer request. The scale of this phenomenon is larger than most outsiders realize. In Nigeria alone, Telegram channels dedicated entirely to funeral announcements and obituaries have tens of thousands of subscribers. Channels like "Dead Souls" or "Obituaries Nigeria" post dozens of death notices every single day. These aren't private groups. They are public channels anyone can join and scroll through. The same pattern repeats in Kenya, Ghana, India, and the Philippines, with localized Telegram channels serving different regions and languages. What makes Telegram particularly suited for this is its channel architecture. Unlike WhatsApp groups where you need an invite, Telegram channels let people broadcast to unlimited subscribers instantly. A family member posts an obituary once and it reaches anyone subscribed across the country or even internationally. For diaspora communities, this is critical. A Nigerian living in London can see that someone back home has died within minutes of the post going live. That immediacy is what drove adoption faster than any other platform could manage for this use case.
I've spent time cataloging these channels because I needed to understand the metadata structure for a research project. The basic workflow is simple. You find a relevant channel by searching keywords like "obituary," "funeral," "in memoriam," or local language equivalents. Once you join, messages stack chronologically. Most channels also use bots to archive posts into spreadsheets or shareable links. Some channel owners run automated scrapers that pull obituary data into CSV files for distribution. You can find some of these shared spreadsheets on Google Drive or GitHub if you know where to look. The one edge case that tripped me up was timezone handling. A lot of these channels don't include timestamps on their posts visibly. When I was cross-referencing death dates against news sources, I kept getting dates wrong because the channel was in Nairobi time and the person died on a different continent. I wrote a small script that parsed the post text for date patterns and then adjusted based on the channel's stated location, which I could usually find in the channel description. Saved me hours of manual correction. From a data perspective, Telegram obituaries are a goldmine but also a minefield. The raw data includes names, dates, relationships, religious affiliation, burial location, and sometimes cause of death. That is extremely useful for demographic studies, public health tracking, and genealogy research. But it is also deeply sensitive personal data. Many of these posts include the phone numbers of the deceased's relatives or the contact details of funeral homes. Scraping this at scale without consent raises real privacy concerns that the Telegram Terms of Service don't fully address for this use case.
Here is something most people don't consider. Telegram obituaries are not evenly distributed across populations. Wealthier urban areas have far more coverage than rural communities. A death in Lagos gets posted to multiple channels. A death in a rural village might only appear on one local group chat and never make it to any public channel. If you are using this data for any kind of statistical analysis, you need to account for that sampling bias or your results will be skewed toward urban demographics. I learned this the hard way after my initial dataset overrepresented Lagos by a factor of roughly four compared to national mortality statistics. The tools you can use to access and organize this data vary in complexity. At the basic level, manual collection works if you only need a few hundred entries. Open a browser, join the channels, copy the text into a spreadsheet. For anything larger, you need automation. Telegram offers an official API, but it requires bot authorization and rate limits apply. Some researchers use Telethon or the unofficial Python wrappers to scrape channels programmatically. These work but can get your bot account banned if you hit too many requests. The safer route for bulk collection is to use RSS bridges or third-party services that mirror Telegram channels as web feeds. There are a handful of open-source projects on GitHub that do exactly this, turning Telegram channels intoAtom feeds you can parse with standard tools. One specific workaround I found useful involved the Telegram Desktop application. The mobile app doesn't let you search message history easily, but the desktop version has a built-in search function that works across all joined channels. You can search for a specific name and it will surface every mention of that person across every channel you are in. I used this to trace how obituaries spread from local family groups into larger public channels. It turned out that most posts were being reshared by just three or four bot accounts per region, which simplified my network mapping considerably.
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There are also commercial and semi-commercial obituary aggregators that have built businesses around scraping and repackaging Telegram death notices. Sites like Tribute.io and local equivalents in various countries pull from Telegram among other sources. These tend to be more polished but less complete because they filter out posts they consider inappropriate or too graphic. If you need raw unfiltered data, going straight to the source channels is still the best option. The biggest limitation of relying on Telegram obituaries is that the data is unstructured and inconsistent. One channel will post a neatly formatted notice with standardized fields. Another will post a blurry photo and three lines of text in a mix of English and Yoruba with no clear date format. Cleaning this data takes significant effort. I typically spend about two to three hours cleaning a batch of five hundred obituary entries, mostly dealing with date normalization and name deduplication across different spelling variations. If you are looking to download or access this data, the most reliable starting point is the Telegram channel directory sites that list obituary channels by country. Search for "Telegram obituary channels Nigeria" or "funeral channel Telegram Kenya" and you will find curated lists. From there you can join the channels and begin collecting. For researchers who need structured data, the GitHub repository for Telegram Obits Dataset contains several cleaned CSV files compiled from public channels, though it hasn't been updated in a while. Newer batches require fresh scraping.
I should also note that this data has been used by governments and NGOs for pandemic mortality tracking during COVID-19, which is both impressive and slightly unsettling. The same channels that post daily funeral notices ended up providing near real-time death rate estimates for several African countries before official health ministry data caught up. That application shows the genuine utility of this data source but also highlights how much personal grief is being harvested as free information infrastructure. For practical purposes, if you want to start building your own collection, begin with manual curation in a spreadsheet. Get the format and fields you need nailed down before automating anything. The channels change their posting styles frequently and scripts built on one month's format will break the next. I keep a running document of current channel formats and update it weekly. It takes about ten minutes a week and has saved me from reworking broken scrapers at least half a dozen times.
