Thursday, April 17, 2014

FamilySearch Obituary Search

imageA couple of people have pointed me to https://familysearch.org/obituaries/. This is a useful little page for searching for obituaries on FamilySearch.org, but I wonder if it suffers from limitations of which you should be aware.

The page searches the Memories feature of FamilySearch Family Tree, perhaps for stories containing the word “obituary.” It doesn’t seem to search the obituaries being indexed by FamilySearch Indexing. One example collection is “United States, Obituaries, American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 1899-2012.”

Both have their place. Perhaps FamilySearch will one day have a search system that searches both.

7 comments:

  1. We are still indexing the obits at FamilySearch (this from an indexer); maybe they're going to release them all at the same time?

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  2. As a indexer I have stopped trying index the obits, they are completely complex and I found them impossible to index. Don't see the use of them at all. They would be more helpful if we just typed in the ENTIRE obit.

    Just my thoughts.

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    Replies
    1. Janice, those obits do take some time, don't they!

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    2. Not only time, but I think they are totally worthless:) Still think we should just type the entire obit. oh well.....

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    3. Indexing obits gets easier with practice. And I definitely wouldn't say it is worthless. I've spent so much time going through newspaper articles in my search results on Ancestry that hardly ever end up being the right person. If the obit is indexed, you'd be able to easily see who their relatives are and determine if it is the right person without having to read through the whole thing.

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  3. I am an indexer for our local historical society; it is very helpful for out of state people !!

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  4. As a person who has been doing in-depth research for more than 25 years and I have done indexing - I was Very careful to follow instructions and to index the groups of obits I worked on - only to have the arbitrator cancel and redo nearly everything I had done and invalidating the actual clearly stated relationships. The project might be worthwhile but the results are going to be really questionable. I won't be doing anymore obit indexing.

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