![]() The State Archives keeps records for the period 1841 to 1920, indexes of which are available online. Births and death in Massachusetts have been registered since 1635, and statewide collection of these records began in 1841. If you cannot provide such proof but you are still a relative, you can ask the decedent's surviving family members to make a request on your behalf.įor death records prior to 1921 you need the Massachusetts State Archives. The Registry issues only certified copies and for more recent certificates you will have to provide proof of eligibility such as a direct blood relation to the decedent named on the record. You can access the Registry through the government website for the state,. The first place to look for death records would be the Massachusetts Registry of Vital Records for the period from 1921 to the present day. A further problem is that not all deaths, not even most, get an obituary, which means that you will need other channels to locate the death record for an ancestor or another person of interest. If you need an obituary from the late 19th century, for instance, you are unlikely to find it in such a database. One potentially disheartening fact about electronic obituary databases is that they tend to include only relatively recent death announcements. Even if the database you are using does not give you the actual text of the obituary - some don't - it will supply you with enough information to locate it at a public library, since these are among the major repositories for newspaper collections. There are a number of digital databases of obituaries where you can search by last name only but the results that will be returned will take time to analyze until you locate the one that is the closest to what you already know about the person. The minimum information threshold you need is the person's last name and at least a vague idea about where they lived and/or died. This is where you will have to embark on a full-scale search, using both online and offline resources. If you are looking for a recent one and you are close to the family of the deceased, this challenge will be insignificant, but if you are collecting information about a distant ancestor, there may not be enough family members alive to remember all the relevant details. Lack of information is really the major challenge in an obituary search. ![]() Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive list of Massachusetts newspapers. In these cases, you can directly contact the paper and ask them to perform an obituary search for you, granted that you have all the relevant details such as full name of the decedent and the exact or at least approximate date when you believe the obituary was published. ![]() Another reason is that even if the newspaper still exists, it will almost certainly not have a digital archive of all its back issues. One is that the newspaper that the obituary appeared in may be well out of circulation, so you might not be able to rely on the paper's own archives. However, locating an obituary can be time-consuming - the older it is, the more time you would have to spend searching for it. Obituaries are also one of the best tools any enthusiast can use to make a family tree or compile a family history. They are a valuable resource for biographers, genealogists, and historians, but they are also used by other professionals as well. 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 Wyomingįor the average person, an obituary might be an obscure item in the daily paper rarely engaged with, but for others, their impact is much more significant. ![]()
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