Ancestry Debuts World's Largest Searchable Online Obituary Collection

Ancestry announced the launch of their Newspapers.com Obituary Collection, as well as an upgrade to Ancestry’s U.S. Obituary Collection, adding to what is now the world’s largest, searchable digital archive of over 262 million worldwide obituaries and death announcements, containing almost 1 billion searchable family members.

Obituaries can provide details about someone’s personal life, personality, or hobbies. Obituaries can also include place of birth, marriage, occupation, residence, and family members, and may even suggest documentation of an individual’s death, such as burial site location or the name of the officiating minister present during the burial. This information is very important to genealogists.

Newspapers.com is the largest online newspaper archive, with over 525+ million pages of historical newspapers, including obituaries, from thousands of printed newspapers across the United States and beyond. Ancestry leveraged powerful, new machine learning algorithms to locate obituaries found within these Newspapers.com pages and extract key facts including names of the deceased and family members, relationships, important dates, and locations. This indexed collection includes extracted facts from nearly 200 million Newspapers.com obituaries.

The new searchable collection is available on Ancestry to all subscribers and the original obituary images are hosted on Newspapers.com. Members with an Ancestry All Access or Newspapers.com Basic subscription have a 1-click option to view the full obituary on Newspapers.com. Some images may require a Publisher Extra subscription as certain newspapers require additional licenses to view their content.

Ancestry’s U.S Obituary Collection contains obituaries from 1930 to present day. Their advance machine learning algorithms now pull the names of all referenced family members listed in these online obituaries and their relationships to each other (in addition to the name of the deceased). This sophisticated technology upgrade expands Ancestry’s growing collection to over 40 million obituaries, to now include four times more searchable family members.

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