Why I Keep Going Back to MLive's Ann Arbor Obituaries
I spend more time than I should digging through the MLive obituaries archive. There's a reason for that. When you're researching family history or local Ann Arbor connections, newspaper records don't always cross-reference cleanly between platforms, and the obituary section on MLive holds onto things longer than I expect most people to realize. The site structure isn't obvious. It takes patience. You can search by last name, city, or date range, but the filters are buried in a ways that make you click around until something clicks. The obituary section lives under the MLive Ann Arbor banner, which means it's technically a sub-section of the main Michigan-based media portal rather than its own standalone archival project. That distinction matters when you're trying to find older records. Some entries from the 2010s have been reformatted or moved, and you'll occasionally hit a page that returns a 404 even though you swear you saw the listing three weeks ago. I learned this the hard way after spending forty-five minutes chasing a death notice for a neighbor whose family had relocated to Florida but still kept an Ann Arbor presence. The original obituary was gone from the main listing, but I found it cached in a local Facebook memorial thread someone had linked to from the archived comments section. Not ideal. I started keeping a spreadsheet of direct URLs I visit so I can check back later if something disappears. What most people don't tell you about using this archive is that the search function has a quirk where common last names like Smith or Johnson will return thousands of results that aren't actually relevant to your area. The default sort is by date, but it also mixes in state-wide results, so you'll see deaths from Marquette and Detroit cluttering your Ann Arbor search. I learned to filter strictly by metro area after my first session turned up seventeen unrelated listings before I realized what was happening. Go to the advanced search, type the full name, add "Ann Arbor" or the specific suburb in the location field, and then sort by date descending. That cuts the noise down significantly.
There's another thing worth noting. The obituary section — the ones families pay to publish with extended biographical details, photos, and service information — is separate from the basic death notices that run in the Ann Arbor News. The free notices are shorter, more clinical, and sometimes lack the dates or relationships that matter for genealogy work. If you're doing serious research, you'll want to focus on the paid listings, which typically include a link to a more detailed tribute page. Those tribute pages tend to stay up longer and have more community engagement, which means additional information in the comments from distant relatives who don't live in the area anymore. I've pulled surnames and marriage dates from those comment sections that weren't in the obituary itself. The biggest limitation of this whole approach is that MLive doesn't archive every publication. Some obituaries from smaller papers in the Washtenaw County area — places like Ypsilanti or Pittsfield Township — don't always get picked up on the Ann Arbor feed. I ran into this gap when researching a great-uncle who died in 2018. His obituary ran in the Ypsilanti Independent, which MLive acquired but never fully integrated into their obituary search index. The entry existed on the site but wasn't searchable through the standard obituary tool. I found it by going to the Ypsilanti paper's main page and browsing the archives manually. It took about twenty minutes instead of the thirty seconds the search bar promised. If you're hitting dead ends, try going directly to the parent newspaper's archive rather than relying on the obituary search specifically. Another practical tip that isn't in any guide: bookmark the Ann Arbor obituary RSS feed if you need to track recent deaths over time. The feed updates whenever a new listing goes live, and it's useful if you're monitoring a neighborhood or watching for connections to a specific surname. The RSS URL isn't advertised anywhere on the page, but you can find it by inspecting the source code or searching for "feed" in the page HTML. It's not the prettiest setup, but it's better than refreshing the main page all day.
I'm not going to pretend this is a complete replacement for cemetery records or vital records offices, because it isn't. The obituaries are a secondary source at best, and they only go back as far as MLive's digitization effort reached, which for Ann Arbor is roughly the mid-2000s for full-text searchable content. Before that, you're looking at microfilm or physical newspaper copies if you need that information. But for anything after 2005, it's the fastest place to start, and the comment sections on the paid obituaries often contain family information that no official record will give you.
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