Is there a way to find an obituary of someone that died out of state but you dont know what state?

Question

one of our friends that was a truck driver died abot 3-5 years ago died out of state a we are not sure what state or the the year he died is there any way to find out for free

Answer 1

SSDI will tell you when he died, but it won't tell you where. If he was driving a truck through Montana on his way home to Wisconsin, all SSDI will tell you is that he had a Wisconsin address when he died. If you think he had an obituary, though, start with http://www.legacy.com or http://www.findagrave.com

Legacy is the service that most major newspaper syndicates use to archive their obituaries. Over 80% of US papers now use the service. It's $3 to read the obituary, but that's not much.

Findagrave is the largest indexing project of cemetaries in the US. Once you find out where he's buried, you can call the cemetary to find out where the death certificate was filed. They have to have a record of the death certificate for every person they bury.

So at most it will cost you $3 to find out. In the meantime, maybe you can also find out more details and pay your last respects.

Answer 2

You can check the Social Security Death Index, available on Ancestry.com, to find in which state he died.  However, an obituary is more likely to have been published in the city or county in which he had bee living at the time of his death, not necessarily the place where he died.  Ancestry.com also has an obituary collection, but it  's far from complete.  You can probably access both on a library computer.  

Answer 3

Hi, you should be able to find him in the Social Security Death Index (a free link to it is http://ssdi.rootsweb.ancestry.com/), and that record should tell you the state.

From there, try to do some creative Google searching (like "doe, john" together with the word "obituary" or "obit" or "obit*"...  and the state in which the death occurred.

If you come up with no obituary records, please post his name and location and date of death (from the SSDI search results), and someone on this forum would be happy to help you look for the record you want.

I hope this helps, good luck!