Death notices written by families are heartfelt. They can be wonderful expressions of appreciation for the deceased. But they aren’t descriptions of a life. Parts of a person’s life can be skipped over that a reporter would not. Because of my interest in Asian-American history, I would always read the obituaries of Japanese-American people born before WWII. Were they sent to internment camps? Did they return to their pre-WWII homes after the war? I miss reading those little bits of history.

I also think factors other than cost are causing this decline. In my town, the local paper is only a weekly, but the city next door has a daily paper that also covers this community – many people may opt to list the obituary there instead, since it has a wider circulation. And yes, thanks to Obamacare, people are probably living longer.

Also too, like Elizabeth says, papers just aren’t as important to people now as they once were. When someone dies, that information might get spread via Twitter, Facebook or text messages, because that is the way people communicate now – it might not occur to people to put it in the paper. And sadly, that means no permanent record for these things any more, or at least no single source for them. And like Steve pointed out, even funeral home websites aren’t the archive that public library holdings are.

A recent trend has been funeral homes hosting memorial web pages, with a photograph and a generous amount of space, for a fraction of the cost the newspaper would charge to run the shortest death notice for a single day.

What happens when the funeral home goes out of business or their server crashes? To my knowledge, no library houses this information. It will be interesting to see 50 or 100 years from now what sort of record will have been kept of our era because of how we treat our deaths.

It’s also interesting how comparatively sanitized our present day newspapers are compared to those of the past. Although they were given to sensational reporting at times (which is an understatement), suicides and violent deaths were treated as newsworthy events, and were even described in what seems like gruesome detail. This tells us a lot about the mentality of the time… not just the reporting style, but a sense of the general mood. In the early 1900′s, there is a story just about every day (sometimes several) of some depressed person jumping off a bridge or taking poison or “blowing his brains out”. Gruesome, yes… but it conveys something real about the time, the collective anxieties.

That was a bit of a tangent… my point is simply that the choices made in keeping records now can have an enormous unforseeable impact on the clarity with which the future generations will be permitted to recall ours.

It’s hard to explain to late adopters why they can no longer find the traditional sources they are used to any more. It makes our job that much harder.

Also, another family member died in 2009. This time the funeral home posted a very lengthy obit for him on their website. I don’t know how long it will be up/managed, but when you do a search for his name on google, the funeral home’s obituary is the first result to appear. (The fifth result is from the newspaper obituary we had published. (Can’t remember if that had to be paid for… ))

No, I think the correlation is valid, and tragic. I get obit requests all the time, and it is getting harder and harder.