In this, the US Social Security Death Index can be of great help. One issue that a researcher may encounter is not knowing when the death occurred. If you know the place of residence of the person whose obituary you are looking for, that would not be hard, especially if you focus on smaller local papers that are more likely to cover more local events, including deaths. Another issue may be the particular newspaper, in which the obituary may have been published. He explains that not all deaths are reported in the obituaries section - some may be featured in a news story, for instance, if the death occurred during an epidemic of some sort or in a car crash. In that, of course, you will be helped by the library staff, who have the necessary professional knowledge to make the search more effective.Īnother word of advice comes from Chris Seggerman from the Arizona State Library. What's more, obituaries are not necessarily published immediately after a death occurs, so you might have to sift through quite a lot of newspaper issues. However, as the Pima County public library warns, there is no guarantee that the specific obituary you are looking for will have been published in a newspaper. Libraries in Arizona maintain extensive newspaper archives, for instance, so you can get access to the obit section of quite a large part of a paper's back issues. Public libraries are among the best information repositories in any state, and Arizona is no exception. There is also an additional category that qualifies for access to death records, and it includes people who have been authorized by a member of the immediate family of the deceased.Īs death records older than 50 years are considered public, you only need to provide a valid ID, a filled in application form, and the fees set for the search of the document and preparing a copy, if needed. Family trees are not valid documents for establishing proof of relationship. In addition, access is granted to genealogical researchers but, again, only if they can prove they have a family relationship with the person on the certificate, through a birth or death record, or a marriage certificate. In other words, only immediate family members, legal representatives and other persons with a legal interest, and private investigators can access death certificates from the last 50 years. Arizona is a "closed record" state, which means that no vital record is considered public until after 50 years have passed since the issuance of the original death certificate. The default settings display the 20 latest death notices for the location, but there is an additional search tool available if you want to expand the range of the search or even choose a particular year, if you know when the death occurred.ĭeath certificates in Arizona are available from the Department of Health Services. Here you can search all the latest obituaries for a certain town or city. The database contains more than 70,000 obituaries and you can search individual documents by name of the deceased or by text, if you know what the obituary featured or might have talked about.Īnother database is available at Arizona Obituaries at Tributes. Here are some of them:Ī good start would be checking online databases about obituaries in Arizona, such as the Arizona Obituary Archive. Still, there is a range of options to consider and choose from. What's more, no newspaper publishes obituaries about all the citizens in the area that pass away every day, which may further complicate things. Although all newspapers have some sort of an obituary or a death notice section, this may not have been true for a particular newspaper a few decades ago. One thing to bear in mind before you start on a search for an obituary is that things don't always happen as fast as you want them to. As death records can be harder to obtain due to statutes of limitations that make these records confidential and usually span a few decades, obituaries are often a more accessible source of information about our ancestors. Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin WyomingĪny genealogical research will hit a wall without reference to death records and obituaries.
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