Uncovering The Stories Of Ann Arbors Enduring Legacy Through Obituaries

Working With Ann Arbor Obituaries For Local History Research

Ann Arbor's obituary records go back well over a century, and they're not as easy to work with as you might assume. The standard approach is to start with the Detroit Free Press archives or the Ann Arbor News collection at the Burton Historical Collection in Detroit. But if you're doing this work for real, there are a few things worth knowing before you spend three hours hitting dead ends. The Ann Arbor area has multiple newspaper sources depending on which decade you're researching. Pre-1980s obits tend to live in the Ann Arbor News and the Detroit News. Post-1990s material often surfaces in the Ann Arbor Observer or MLive. The University of Michigan's library system also holds microfilm and digitized collections, but the finding aids are incomplete. I found that out the hard way when I was tracing a family line from Ypsilanti to Ann Arbor and spent two afternoons looking for a microfilm that wasn't catalogued until someone flagged it on a genealogy message board. The practical workflow is straightforward but not fast. You start with the Michigan Death Index, which gives you the death date, age at death, and county. That narrows your newspaper search window to a 30-day period around the date. Newspapers typically ran obituaries within 1 to 5 days of death, sometimes earlier if the family placed a paid notice. The index itself is maintained by the Michigan Department of Vital Records and can be requested through their forms, though you'll need to provide proof of relationship or a legitimate genealogical purpose depending on the record's age.

For Ann Arbor specifically, the Washtenaw County Courthouse holds probate records that sometimes include obituary references or funeral home files. Those aren't online. I drove up there once with a letter of request and got the file I needed in about twenty minutes, but you need to show some patience. They don't do rush requests and they won't photocopy more than five pages at a time without advance notice. Another source people overlook is the funeral home records. Several Ann Arbor families used Kaul Funeral Home and Miller & Menkel Funeral Home over the decades. Some of these places keep their own files, and a polite phone call or email from a researcher can sometimes yield copies of obituaries that never made it into any newspaper database. One time I got a full obituary from the 1950s that wasn't digitized anywhere because it was a small-town paper that folded and whose records were never microfilmed. The funeral home had kept the original typescript in a filing cabinet. Here's where the process gets tricky and where most beginners stumble. Ann Arbor had a large immigrant population in the early twentieth century, particularly German and Eastern European families who often had obituaries published in ethnic newspapers. The German-language papers like the Ann Arbor Zeitung are not well digitized. If you're researching those lines, you need to know basic German and plan to handle the physical microfilm yourself at the Library of Congress or the University of Michigan's HathiTrust collection. There is no OCR search available for those titles.

Also worth noting: obituaries in this area frequently list the deceased's arrival date in Ann Arbor, their place of origin, their employer, and surviving family members spread across multiple states. That last point is important for tracing migration patterns. I've seen obituaries that effectively serve as census-style snapshots of where an extended family ended up after moving west in the 1890s or after leaving the South during the Great Migration. The information is embedded in the prose and requires actual reading rather than keyword searching. A search for a surname alone will miss half the useful details because the family moved around and the person might be listed under a different name or married name in the text. The University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library has some relevant collections, particularly related to university affiliates and their families, but their obituary index is not comprehensive. It covers U-M employees and notable community figures well. Regular residents often get short mentions or nothing at all. If you're researching someone who wasn't connected to the university in any visible way, you're better off going through the newspaper routes directly. One more thing that catches people off guard. Many Ann Arbor obituaries from the 1960s through the 1980s were handled by the Ann Arbor Sun or the Daily Collegian for university-related deaths. These are smaller publications and their archives are fragmented. Some issues are missing. The Ann Arbor District Library has a partial run but not complete coverage, and their digital archive only goes back to about 2005 for full-text searchable content. Physical files exist but accessing them requires an appointment.

If you're just starting out, I'd suggest focusing on one or two family lines and mapping out which newspapers covered your target periods before you dig in. The time investment per obituary look-up runs about fifteen to thirty minutes once you know the system, but the learning curve upfront is steep. You'll waste several hours before you figure out which archive holds what. Keep detailed notes of every search you run and what you found, because you will come back to this later and you won't remember which database you checked first.