National Obituary Archive(NOA)

By: Michael Putzel
1/7/2002

There was a time when a person had to be a hero of the Revolutionary War to get an obituary in a major American newspaper. And the notices that were published then often appeared so long after the fact that they frequently focused on the pomp and circumstance of the funeral and who attended as much as on the life being commemorated or any details surrounding the death.

In the last century, the published obituary has become a near-universal form of homage in the United States, but the increasing cost of having death notices printed and the limited reach of the newspapers where they traditionally appear are giving rise to more widely accessible—and frequently less expensive—forms of tribute.

The advent of instant, boundless communications on the World Wide Web, where people not only find information but can act on it, is changing the age-old death announcement from a briefly noted farewell to an enduring, multifaceted memorial.

The shift toward Web-based obituaries has been spearheaded by establishment of the National Obituary Archive with the participation of the National Funeral Directors Association, America Online and nearly 1,000 contributing funeral directors.
Led by Carmon Community Funeral Homes in Connecticut, many funeral homes are posting obituaries on their own Web sites, as well as having them published in national repositories visited by millions of obituary readers, genealogists and researchers.

“The simplicity is surprising,” wrote former Pennsylvania funeral director Frank S. Miller in a recent edition of YB News, describing his ability to post obituaries to a funeral home Web site. “Log in, go to the funeral notice page, click to add a new listing, paste the informational text, enter the deceased person’s name and date of service, log off, and you’re finished. When the five-minute procedure is completed, family members across the country, around the world, can read it, make plans to attend, or send an e-mail message of sympathy to be printed for the family. It’s easy and fast, and it’s inexpensive.”

Most newspapers still run obituaries of prominent figures as news stories, and a few have raised the practice to an art form, but nearly all newspapers now charge a classified advertising fee to publish death notices. Typical listings are printed in alphabetical order, last name first, with only an occasional black-and-white photo to distinguish one notice from the next.

Declining newspaper readership and an increasingly mobile society have prompted many funeral directors and families to seek new ways of notifying friends and preserving memories.

They have found that obituaries no longer are limited to two-dimensional clippings that appear in the newspaper for a day or two and then get tossed out or slipped into a family Bible, where they are rarely seen, even by relatives.

The modern, Web-based obituary can be a dynamic memorial that begins with an attractive and colorful, illustrated life story written by family members and posted on the Web within minutes after the family approves the details. Instead of a brief mention of the time and place of the services, visitors to the site can click a button to get the exact address, an instant map and turn-by-turn directions to the funeral home, place of worship or cemetery. As families and friends collect their favorite photos and mementos of the deceased, those images can be added to the site, while other far-away friends, perhaps learning of the event by e-mail, go to the site to sign a guest book or add their own eulogy.
The obituary reader who spots a familiar name often feels the natural impulse to express condolences to the bereaved family, but we all know how easy it is to put off or forget our best intentions. When a reader spots an obituary online or is notified by e-mail after registering to be kept informed of such events, he or she has only to click a mouse button to order flowers, make a memorial contribution or send a note to the bereaved. With others adding their own recollections, favorite stories, poems and pictures, the obituary becomes a lasting memorial celebrating the life of a cherished friend, not just a brief factual recitation of birth, death, names of survivors and logistical details to be discarded with the next day’s trash.

The ability to store huge numbers of records in permanent, electronic archives and search them in seconds makes Web-based obituary services a treasure trove for genealogists and amateur historians. Most funeral directors know the plight of determined family researchers who go to great lengths to track down clues to their ancestry. That search becomes easier with the publication of every new obituary or death record on the Web. The National Obituary Archive (NationalObituaryArchive.com) alone now contains more than 50 million death records, all searchable not just by name but by city, date of death and numerous other criteria. Other sites, such as Legacy.com and AmericanMemorials.com, use special Web-crawling software to search newspaper Web sites and index the death notices by name.

As Americans increasingly leave their ancestral homes, with children moving away to go to school or work and retirees seeking new, warmer climes for their leisure years, fewer and fewer people live within the circulation area of their hometown paper. A Census Bureau study based on the 1990 census concluded that less than half of all Americans still live in the area where they were born. That makes it more difficult to reach family and friends by publishing an obit in the local paper, and the trends don’t appear to favor newspapers.

With the arrival of broadcasting, particularly television, newspaper circulation and readership began a long and apparently inexorable decline. Daily newspaper circulation peaked at 62.8 million in the 1980s and has drifted steadily downward to 56 million in 1999, according to figures compiled by the industry itself. Falling readership is even more dramatic. In 1964, more than 80 percent of adult men and women in the United States read their daily newspaper on weekdays. By 1997, that figure had fallen to 58.3 percent, and the number of women reading a daily newspaper was down to a mere 53 percent.

The Internet’s popularity, meanwhile, continues to grow, despite the bursting of the “dot com” bubble that weeded out many poorly financed or ill-conceived startups, including several that sought to break into the funeral industry. Today 180 million people in the United States have access to the Internet, and the Web audience grew 12 percent in the last year, a sure sign that people are finding valuable information and useful resources at their fingertips. What was a curiosity for the techno elite just a few years ago is now a mainstream medium and destined to become ubiquitous as new technology makes Internet use faster and easier for everyone.

The trend toward cremation also appears to favor the use of online memorials. As more and more Americans forego the traditional burial and gravestone, an online obituary serves as an attractive, environmentally friendly way to plant a lasting memorial in cyberspace. Just because people decide they don’t want a physical plot or stone does not mean they wish to be forgotten.

The evolution of newspapers as the place for publication of obituaries began in the early days of the Republic, as the penny press enabled large numbers of people to read the same papers and share common interests.

The first real national newspaper, the National Intelligencer, began publication in 1800 and printed nearly 200 obituaries in 1818, according to a count by Janice Hume, author of Obituaries in American Culture. All but 20 of the men—and those eulogized were overwhelmingly male—were cited for their military service or for the offices they held, and performance in uniform always came first.

Newspapers remained the accepted place to publish obituaries for two centuries, although the major papers generally ignored the deaths of women, African Americans, other minorities and most men who hadn’t distinguished themselves in public service, business or other professional endeavors. If women did get a mention of their own, the writer usually focused on the deeds of their husbands, the number of children they produced and, if they died after a particularly long and painful illness, the steadfast resignation and calm with which they accepted their fate.

Alden Whitman, the legendary obituary writer for The New York Times who frequently picked his subjects for their fame or achievements and interviewed them before they died, acknowledged the cliché that death is the great leveler, but he added wryly that “it obviously levels some a great deal more than others.”

Paid obituaries, sometimes called death notices to distinguish them from news stories, were instituted by large, metropolitan newspapers that concluded they could no longer run news reports of every death in their circulation areas that families wanted published. Offering classified ads as an alternative presented a convenient way to accommodate readers’ wishes and earn new revenue to offset declining circulation and the rising costs of newsprint. The practice spread to smaller dailies and weeklies in the early 1980s. According to U.S. News & World Report, another spike in newsprint prices in the mid-1990s accelerated the trend.

Pat MacDonald, publisher of the MacDonald Classified Service that helps newspapers sell classified advertising, told the news magazine that 90 percent of the major newspapers in the country were charging for obituaries in 1997, and he predicted the sweep would be complete by the turn of the century. Today, there are still a few exceptions, but MacDonald’s assessment appears to have been close to the mark.

Funeral directors and their client families have grappled with newspapers that apply their editorial prerogatives to paid space. If the family is willing to pay by the character, word or line to include the names of grandchildren or special friends, they reason, the newspaper shouldn’t object. Some do, however, and dictate the format for acceptable notices. Paid ads or not, many newspapers have rules that bar loaded adjectives, such as “beloved” or “devoted,” from their columns and insist on reporting the simple fact of death, rather than religious alternatives, such as saying someone has “gone to be with his Lord” or “entered everlasting life.”

Even when advertisers are willing to pay for space, newspapers have a limited number of pages they can run through their presses, leading them to impose limits on what information they will accept—or charge enough to regulate how many lines people will take for a death notice. Such limits hardly apply on the Web, where text can be of almost unlimited length at no additional cost and color photos are the most popular way to make obituaries attractive and memorable. As connection speeds rise to accommodate the public’s demand for more information with less waiting time, audio and video undoubtedly will become standard fare in modern obituaries.

Michael Putzel, a former White House and foreign correspondent for The Associated Press and The Boston Globe is a Vice President of Continental Computer Corp. He writes frequently on how technology is changing the lives of ordinary Americans.