They play a crucial role in preserving history. Obituary archives can bring together family, ancestors, friends, life partners, and sometimes even distant strangers. Obituaries are considered a lasting written record of someone's existence. When you search obituaries, often what you find is the only time a certain person has appeared in a newspaper. Often, they tell you whether or not the person was married, who their children were, who their parents were, the names of their spouses, and many other details. Why are obituary archives Important?Įvery obituary tells a little story about a person's life. The price of an obituary usually depended on the word count, the number of insertions, and the inclusion of photos. Newspapers started including them as paid advertisements and began charging for publishing obituaries. The newspaper industry defined a new term for these user-written obituaries, "Death Notes." If the obituary needs to tell an important storyĪs centuries went by, and towns turned into cities, families started writing obituaries on their own so that they would include more important details about their relatives.How much time the editors needed to spend researching about the deceased in order to write the obituary.How important they were for the community. ![]() The length of a person's funeral obituary depended on several things: Famous people and those whom the editors thought would be of significant general interest would get more detailed obituaries. The newspaper editors used to decide who should have a more comprehensive obituary, based on the deceased's status and popularity in the community. In most cases, an obituary was just a one-liner announcing that a certain person had died. With fewer pages, there was limited space for ads and news articles, so the obituaries were usually very short. The process took time, which is why newspapers only used to have several pages (only four pages in most cases). As newspapers changed over the years, so did obituaries, but their essence has remained the same to this day.īefore the linotype machine was invented in 1886, publishers used to set by hand the type for printing daily newspapers. Obituaries have been present in newspapers for centuries.
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