Save those Online Obituaries

Just like any online record, online obituaries on funeral home websites can disappear. Funeral homes go out of business, merge with other facilities, change their entire website design, etc. Any of these situations can cause obituaries that were once online to go away forever.

Newspaper obituaries may hang around for a longer amount of time, but they may be shorter than the notice published on the funeral home’s website. My mother’s obituary on the funeral home website contains the names of some survivors and pre-deceased family members that we felt were important to include, but were “too distant” to meet the newspaper’s publication standards.

That’s another reason to get as many obituary copies as you can.

But those funeral home website obituaries–save them when you see them. Tomorrow may be too late.


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