For families, writers and funeral homes

Obituary and life-event research

The dates, places and newspaper notices behind one life — gathered and cited

Writing an obituary, a eulogy or a family history and need the facts right? We gather the birth, marriage, death and newspaper notices that exist for one person from public archives, each with its citation, so what you write can be checked by anyone.

What you would tell us

The person's name, approximate dates and places
What you already know

What you would receive

A dated list of the records found, each cited and linked
Quotations from newspaper notices, verbatim
What was searched and not found

Which public archives this draws on today

Chronicling America (Library of Congress) — Historic US newspapers 1690s–1963 with OCR text: obituaries, notices, local news
National Archives Catalog (NARA) — Passenger lists, naturalizations, military service and pension files, homestead/land files, census images, federal records
Open Archives (207 archives: Netherlands, Belgium, France, Suriname + US indexes) — Civil registration (birth, marriage, death), church books, population registers, notarial and tax rolls, militia — 207 archives
Reclaim The Records (US vital indexes, via Open Archives) — Birth, marriage and death INDEXES released under FOIA: New York State & NYC, New Jersey, Missouri, Nebraska, Mississippi, Maryland, Connecticut; BIRLS veteran deaths
Riksarkivet (Sweden) — registers & archives — Indexed birth, marriage and death register entries (parish, date, parents), plus archive volumes and AI-transcribed text
DigitalNZ / Papers Past (New Zealand) — Papers Past newspapers 1839–1980s (full text), plus NZ library, museum and archive collections

6 live archives hold the record types this service rests on. Archives whose terms forbid automated access are never searched by machine; where one of them holds the answer, the report says exactly where to look.

Interested?

No spam, no card. One email when it opens, and you can say what you need in reply.

Or search the archives yourself, free, right now.

Provara's rule for every service: a fact is shown with the record it came from, or it is marked as unsourced. Nothing on this page states a fact about any person or place; it describes what would be researched and from which public archives.