OBITUARIES

Genealogists love to use newspaper obituaries to further their genealogical research. Obituaries help verify date and place of death. And if you are really lucky, it will tell the details of a person's life that otherwise have to be gleaned from many different sources. Besides death information, obituaries can list date and place of birth, parents and siblings names, spouses and children's names, occupation, hobbies and organization membership. On the flip side of that coin is the obituary that simply states "Mrs. John Smith died last Tuesday."

The Medina County District Library’s obituary index is an ongoing project to index the obituaries and death notices appearing in the Medina County Gazette and the Medina Sentinel.   Library volunteers have started indexing the Sentinel death notices also, but they have a long way to go.

The Obituary Index covers obituaries, death notices and probate notices that have appeared in the Medina County Gazette since the 1850’s.  Not every individual who died in Medina County has an obituary in the Gazette or Sentinel. Some families preferred to have the death notices listed in other publications. And when the Gazette started charging for printing obituaries, some families decided not to incur that expense.  And prior to the 1870’s, any kind of death notice was unusual and reserved for only the most prominent citizens of the county. Children, women and minorities are under-represented in the early newspapers. 

In the past, library users traveled from across the country to consult the obituary index, hoping to locate their ancestors. Now that the index is computerized and available on the library web site, requests for copies of the obituaries come in from around the world. Most often, library members consult the index to locate death dates of their ancestors for genealogical purposes.  However, it is also used by attorneys for the purpose of settling estates and historians for research purposes.

The index is available online at: http://mcdl.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=150&Itemid=98

There have been some unusual death notices in the Gazette: