Obituatries - i only know the last name?

Question

i'm trying to find the obituary for someone, and i only know there last name.

i don't know when they died, or their first name.

I know his wife's name. and his kids.

i need a service that's free.

help!

Answer 1

You are asking the impossible.  You cannot go on the internet, type in someone's kids names and have their obituary just pop up.  Obits are listed by the DECEASED and date, not by survivors names.  To make matters worse, you don't even know when he died.

If you did have all the necessary info to find an obit online, very little services of that nature would be free.  At the minimum, you would have to purchase the obit for $2.95 on a site like legacy.com.  You can pay for it by credit card online and they will immediately email you the obit.

Answer 2

you could try legacy .com but without a first name or date of death it's going to be a very broad search especially if it's a common last name

Answer 3

let's start by assuming you know the country that this man lived in.  I can give you information about the US.  You need SOME idea of when this may have happened. If it was during the last 50 yrs.. almost all Americans will show up in the social security death index.  If the last name was Garfield, and the wife/kids live in Dallas co, Texas, you can use the advanced search for anyone with that last name, who died in Dallas county (or state of Alabama) in 1972.  Or in the last 50 yrs.  If you know the approximate age of the children.. if one of them was born in 1984, you know he didn't die in 1972.  In other words, it must be narrowed down.  The same thing for some estimate of his birth. If you learn that he was possibly born in 1953, you can use that. If he was born in 1917, he could have died before the 1960s when the social security index started.

Having the name of the wife and kids does mean you can use google.. put the name in quotation marks, and it will find the full phrase. That is a possible way to see where they live. You can TRY using www.zabasearch.com, to find where his wife lives (unless he died 10 yrs ago, in that case, she probably has remarried and/or moved).  

The obvious thing would be find one of the kids.. but I am guessing there is maybe some reason you can't do that. Is there someone else you can ask?

These clues are what you have to use, BEFORE you look for an obituary.  Once you have a name and place, you can use resources such as the newspaper web site, the county library, so forth.

I hate to mention this.. but there are even persons who died, who don't even HAVE obits.  But, you have to come up with some basic information, which no website (free or not) can give you.

Answer 4

You probably will have to go to the library yourself as there are too many variables that you do not know and Libraries do not have the help that they can donate to looking at every newspaper for many years.  First you need to narrow the years -- you must have a range of years that you can look through for instance guessing he was born about 1925, married around 22 and died at 70.  So your range would be 1985-1995.  But that is still 3650 newspapers that would have to be searched and that is asking a lot of your local library.  Have you checked social security records?  Try to find out more information?  You can always request a non certified death certificate if you know where they died.

Answer 5

if you know where they died...you could search old newspapers. or contact the public library in your area. they should be able to help. good luck.