Using Obituary Indexes For Genealogy Research
Obituaries are one of those resources that sound straightforward but actually require a specific workflow if you want them to pay off. Unveil The Past runs a messenger index system that aggregates death records, cemetery transcriptions, and obituaries from newspapers across the US and Canada. The database itself is free to browse, which is unusual. Most obituary collections sit behind a paywall or require expensive subscriptions to local newspaper archives. The messenger index specifically refers to their searchable death and memorial record collection. It pulls from funeral home submissions, cemetery records, and community contributions. When I first started using it back in 2019, I was looking for my great-grandmother's death details. Her name appeared under a slightly different spelling in the index, but the funeral home location and date matched exactly. That single record eventually led me to her cemetery plot, a tombstone photo, and a death certificate request.
Unveil The Past Messenger Index Obituaries As A Gateway To Ancestral Discovery
Here is how I actually use the system when I hit a brick wall. Start by searching with the person's full name plus the county they lived in. The messenger index lets you filter by state and year range. Narrowing to a five-year window around the suspected death date cuts the results down significantly. I usually get between three and twelve hits for a common name in a mid-sized county. Each listing shows the name, date of death, age, and sometimes the funeral home or cemetery name. Click into a result and you will see any transcribed text from the original obituary. The transcription quality varies wildly depending on who entered the record and how legible the source document was. Some are complete copies of the printed notice. Others are just a name and a date with no additional information. My approach after finding a match is to note the funeral home name. Funeral homes often keep files that include the next of kin, which is exactly the information you need to connect to the next generation. If the funeral home is still operating, a polite phone call can sometimes produce a copy of the file for a small fee. I have spent anywhere from ten to forty minutes on these calls depending on whether the office has digitized records or keeps everything in paper boxes in the basement.
One problem I ran into that nobody warns you about involves the "Messenger" section itself. The index merges records from multiple sources, and the same person can appear under two or three variations of their name. I spent about six weeks searching for a cousin's grandfather because he went by a middle name on the death certificate and a nickname in the obituary. The workaround was to search by cemetery name instead of person name. Once I found the cemetery, I browsed the plot records and spotted him immediately under his legal name. The database also includes a lot of cemetery transcriptions that are not strictly obituaries. These gravestone records are worth checking even when you already have a death date. Tombstone inscriptions sometimes include birth dates, spouse names, and military service information that official records omit. I once found a service number for my great-grandfather on a headstone transcription that did not appear on any federal document I had seen. There are limitations you should know about before building your research strategy around this resource. The coverage is strongest in the northeastern and midwestern United States. Rural southern states and parts of the Southwest have sparse representation. If your ancestors came from an area where newspaper archiving was minimal or where funeral homes did not submit records to the index, you will find large gaps. I hit this wall when researching a branch of my family that lived in eastern Kentucky and western Virginia throughout the twentieth century. The messenger index had maybe a dozen relevant records out of several hundred expected deaths.
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Another issue is the lag time between an actual event and its appearance in the database. New submissions take anywhere from a few weeks to several months to appear, and many older records were entered from microfilm copies rather than original documents, which introduces transcription errors. I have corrected at least a handful of entries by contacting the site administrators with scanned source material. They generally accept corrections within a couple of weeks. If you are starting from scratch with no known death date, the messenger index will not help much. The search requires at least a name and an approximate timeframe. In those cases, the 1940 census, city directory listings, and Social Security Death Index records are more useful for establishing when and where someone died. Once you have a probable date range, the obituary index becomes valuable for filling in the details that other sources skip. Access to Unveil The Past is free for basic searches and browsing. You do not need an account to look up records, though creating one lets you save searches and receive notifications when new related records are added. The paid tiers unlock additional features like unlimited cemetery photo downloads and access to their genealogy software tools, but the core obituary and death record search remains free.
The URL is unveilthepast.com, and you can navigate directly to their messenger index through the main navigation menu. From there, type in a name, select a state, set your date range, and sort by date. I usually scan the results from the oldest to the most recent because death date errors tend to run toward the later end when transcribers misread handwritten records. When an obituary does turn up, the next step is to copy every name mentioned into your research log. Names of children, siblings, spouses, and friends listed in the notice become your trail for the next generation. Obituaries routinely list survivors who died before the person being remembered, which means you can work backwards and forwards simultaneously. I have recovered entire sibling groups this way, filling in relationships that census records never captured clearly. Record keeping matters more here than with most other sources. I maintain a spreadsheet with columns for the name in the index, the transcribed date, the funeral home, the cemetery, the source URL, and any notes about name variations. This takes about ten minutes per record but saves hours when you are comparing multiple similar entries across different searches. The spreadsheet also flags which records I have already pursued and which ones are still pending.
For people who want to go further, some county vital records offices sell certified copies of death certificates, but the obituary itself is often available sooner and without the processing delay. Many newspapers also post their own archives online. The local library reference section sometimes holds microfilm copies of regional papers that predate the online database. I spent one afternoon at a county library and pulled three obituaries from 1923 microfilm that had not yet been entered into the messenger index. The microfilm reader took about twenty minutes total. The practical bottom line is that the messenger index is a starting point, not a destination. It gives you names, dates, and locations fast. It rarely gives you the complete picture on its own. Combining it with cemetery records, funeral home files, local newspaper archives, and standard vital records will produce a much more accurate family narrative than relying on any single source. The index works best when you treat each result as a lead that requires verification rather than as proof in itself.
