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During the majority of the 19th century, numerous obituaries found in American newspapers were essentially written replicas of tombstone inscriptions, primarily consisting of names, birthdates, and death dates. During the American Civil War, obituaries expanded to provide additional biographical information about fallen soldiers in order to reach as many relatives as possible. In the late 1900s, amid the Industrial Revolution, obituaries began to include details such as the deceased's financial standing, occupation, and years of employment. Local newspaper obituaries frequently provide information regarding funeral and burial arrangements for the deceased.A standardized obituary template was established by funeral homes and newspapers in the 1930s. This template typically consisted of four parts: a death announcement, a brief biography with a list of survivors, and funeral details.The records in this collection were extracted using machine learning technology and may contain mistakes due to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and the automatic extraction. Users are encouraged to fix such mistakes using the “Suggest an alternative” feature that is found on every record page. Images for these newspapers can be viewed on OldNews.com (https://www.oldnews.com/en). |
