How can I get obit dates?

Question:

How can I get obit dates?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: If you know which funeral home handled the burial arrangements, call them and ask for a copy from their records. Obits are paid by the family, but placed by the funeral home and billed later. So the funeral home has to keep records of all of the services they provide and keep them for many, many years in case of audit (or later family arrangements where they can pull info from old records).

If you can't find that, then figure out the date of death and check all of the local newspapers for the week after death. If you live in the same town, you can view the newspapers on microfilm at the local library. If you live farther away, ask your local library to order them through Interlibrary Loan. If you're in another state, you can visit the USGenWeb site for the county where the person lived and ask a volunteer to pull it for you and send you a copy.
http://www.usgenweb.org

Depending on how recent the obituary, you may also find it on Legacy.com. It's a service that many newspapers have farmed out archival of obituaries to so that they don't have to deal with them. Legacy provides the archival and you can retrieve the obituaries from their member newspapers for a small fee. http://www.legacy.com

Ancestry.com, USGenWeb local sites and Rootsweb all have some obituaries that people like you and I have submitted into their databases. You can check them out, but the odds are that you'll still end up retrieving them from the library.

Good luck and I hope you find what you need.