The Newspapers.c​​om Obituary Collection includes records from over 539 million newspaper pages ranging from the 1800s–2000s.

All Ancestry subscribers will be able to see these recently indexed newspaper records. You could also see Ancestry Hints appear in your tree from this collection. If you have a membership to Newspapers.c​​om Publisher Extra, you will be able to see all of the actual images. Ancestry All Access subscribers, who only have access to Newspapers.com Basic, will not have access to all images.

Because we provide search results for surviving members and additional family members named in obituaries in our search results, you may see a hint for an individual who is still living in the obituary.

Finding Newspapers.c​​om obituaries on Ancestry

1. From any page on Ancestry, click the Search tab and select Card Catalog.
2. On the left side of the page, click Birth, Marriage & Death under Filter by Category.
3. In the Keywords field, type “obituaries” and click Search.
4. From the search results, click Newspapers.com Obituary Index. For help searching all obituaries on Ancestry, click here.
5. Enter information and click Search.
6. From the list of search results, click View Record next to information you want to view.
7. From the index page, click the newspaper thumbnail. You’ll be brought to Newspapers.com.
8. Sign in to Newspapers.com with the email address or username you use on Ancestry and your Ancestry password. If you’re already signed in, skip this step. If you have an All Access membership and are prompted to link your Ancestry account to your Newspapers.com account, do that first.
9. You should now see the newspaper page. If that newspaper is part of a Newspapers.com membership that you don’t have access to, you’ll see the option instead to start or upgrade to that membership.

How newspapers become searchable

To make the content of older newspapers searchable, Newspapers.c​​om scans them with optical character recognition (OCR) technology, a type of software that converts printed text into an editable computer file.

OCR technology has transformed the world’s accessibility to printed documents, and for the most part, it’s quite reliable. However, its accuracy depends on the quality of the document being scanned. When a newspaper is faded or damaged, its transcription may contain some errors.

Submitting feedback and correcting errors

If you find an error in a newspaper or want to add searchable information, you can add alternate information or report the issue either from Ancestry or from Newspapers.com.

1. On Newspapers.com, from the image of a newspaper page, click the image and click Add alternate info or Report issue.
2. Click the pencil icon next to a fact to add alternate information, or click Add additional fact to add a new fact.
3. The alternate fact will appear in green. When you’re finished adding alternate facts, click Done.
4. To see an alternate fact, click the three dots next to a fact.

To add or correct a fact on Ancestry, from an index page, click Add alternate information or Report issue under the thumbnail of the newspaper. For more information, see our article about correcting a record.

How obituaries and records are indexed

To index the content on Newspapers.com, we use new machine learning technology to look at the pages, section them into individual articles, and then identify which ones are obituaries. Once the obituaries are found, this new technology extracts key details including:

• name(s) of the deceased
• family members
• relationships
• important dates
• location information

This information is then put into a searchable database making it simpler for you to discover the records.