The GRHS Obituary Project
A B C D E F G H I
J K
L M N O P Q R
S-Sce
Sch
Sci-So
Sp-Sz
T U V W X Y Z
Click on the first letter of the surname you are interested in.
Surnames starting with X are not indexed.
Pages vary in size from 250 KB to 4000 KB.
The Alice Essig Informational Cards Collection
Alice Essig created about 12,000 index cards for individuals who were researched at GRHS using, in part, information from these Obituary files.
Getting a Copy of an Obituary from the GRHS Collection
To acquire copies of obituaries from GRHS, contact the Society at headquarters providing us with :
- A list of which obituaries are wanted (include the name of each deceased and date(s) of death
- Your name
- Your full postal address, including country
- Your e-mail address
In 2002 GRHS had around 200,000 obituaries on index cards in its Headquarters. Those cards have been scanned as jpeg images and are in files in the computers at GRHS Headquarters. Some of these include photos of the decedents. In the same year the GRHS Obituary Digitizing Project began, the above obituaries were digitized and placed into files in the Personal Ancestral File 4.0 program. Since that time, about another 300,000 obituaries have been placed into those files.
There is a cost of US $5.00 funds plus postage for the first obituary and US $2.00 funds for each additional obituary in the same order / request. Costs double for non-members of GRHS. You will be contacted with the total cost and provided with payment options. For those who wish to have the obituary sent by email, let the staff know.
On rare occasions typographical errors may occur in the digital renditions of the original 200,000 obituaries. If you find such errors, please notify us and we will make every effort to correct them. If you feel that the digital copy you receive has errors, contact the office to see if the obituary was one of those scanned as jpeg images. The staff will check to see if the obituary is one of the jpeg-image obituaries. If it is, the staff will compare the digitized obituary you received to the jpeg-image obituary and apprise you of corrections. The staff will also check to see if the digitized copy you received is one of the original 200,000 which may have a photo of a decedent. If it has a photo, the staff will send you the jpeg-image obituary if you wish.
Obituary Digital Project Overview
It is NOT the purpose of this project to input obituaries donated to the Society for the purpose of establishing a system of searching them for data and information. The purposes of the project are two-fold:
- To input obituaries for the sake of digital preservation of the collection
- To place an index of the collection on the Society's web site
Indexes are placed on the Society's web site to allow access to its Obituary Collection to interested parties who do not have access to the physical collection of obituaries at the Society's headquarters.
The obituary indexes found in this web site consist of:
- Surname (if male; husband's surname, if female)
- Given name(s) (plus the maiden name, in parentheses, if the female was married, plus a middle name, plus the surname of a first spouse, or if married more than once a third, fourth, etc., spouse)
- Birth date
- Death date
[A birth or death date found in parentheses ( ) in the indexes indicates that no date was found in the obituary of the decedent. A date found in parentheses was from some other source or was determined by some other means. 1) We may have subtracted the age of the decedent from the date of the newspaper in which the obituary was printed, that is, if the date of the newspaper was available. 2) Someone, possibly the donor of the obituary, may have penciled in a date onto the obituary itself, then sent the obituary to us.]
Ted J. Becker, GRHS Obituary Committee Chairman (April 2010)