The Value of Obituaries

I've been pursuing membership with the Sons of The Revolution organization, because of my direct ancestor Benjamin Crawford's military service in the revolutionary war. This requires vital records proving every generation up to the ancestor in question. Vital records are birth, marriage, or death records that help establish the parents and children of an individual. This is all great, however when you start delving into the 1800s and earlier, you run into a problem. Nobody reliably has these types of records on file, and the government wasn't typically keeping track of them anyway. So, how do you prove your lineage? You look at obituaries.

You might be wondering if census data can also be used as a vital record, because it's really easy to find. But the reality is that, especially in the 1700s, they don't say who's in a household, only the head of the house. This doesn't establish any type of relationship. Obituaries, on the other hand, can be a goldmine of information. They count as vital records because they often list surviving family members, and the parents of the deceased. So how do we find them?

You have a couple options:

1. Hope that your family kept old newspaper snippets
2. Pay money to the https://www.newspapers.com/ website
3. Figure out where someone died, and search the local archives

I prefer the last option, because it's free. But what if you can't find any obituaries for a specific person? You need to start looking for adjacent obituaries. For example, I've had a difficult time finding any evidence that James Huston Crawford's father was Robert Crawford, apart from census data and old family stories. James doesn't have any obituaries available as far as I've been able to find. But he had a lot of siblings, and one in particular was very well documented. His name was William Chambers Crawford, and I found a very detailed obituary in the Tama County newspaper archives:

Check out the whole article here

The key to this obituary is that it specifically mentions that his mother and father was Robert and Elizabeth Crawford, and that he had a surviving brother "J H Crawford" who was living in Washington State at the time. This gives us enough evidence to prove that James Huston Crawford was the son of Robert Crawford. This is a great example of how obituaries can be used to prove lineage.

So, if you're feeling stumped trying to prove out a relationship, check out the obituaries of the siblings, parents, and children of the person in question, and you might find the exact evidence you're looking for.