How Have Obituaries Changed?

Public death notices about common people are a fairly recent development, and they've changed a lot since their inception. Learn how obituaries went from dry statements to tributes to truth in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://people.howstuffworks.com/culture-traditions/funerals/obituary-history.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum Here. You or someone you know may still
subscribe to a local newspaper, to a print edition, even
depending on a number of factors such as your age
and health and whether or not your beetlejuice. You might

(00:23):
turn immediately to the obituaries section, curious if there's anyone
you recognize among the faces and names of the recently deceased.
If so, you are certainly not alone. For more than
two hundred and fifty years, newspapers have published obituaries to
announce the deaths of both the famous and familiar. Obituaries

(00:44):
fulfill a unique role in local communities and broader society,
both notifying the public of a passing and inviting them
to join the collective mourning process. As print newspaper circulation
has declined sharply over the past twenty five years, as
so have print obituaries, but the familiar format of the

(01:05):
obituary remains even as death notices move online to websites
or heartfelt posts on social media. Just for one example,
ancestry dot com, the genealogy website, about five years ago
upgraded its online obituary archives to include more than two
hundred and sixty two million published obituaries dating back to

(01:26):
the seventeen fifties. They used algorithms to extract biographical data
from centuries of print obituaries, birth and death dates, geographical locations, parents' names,
and next of kin in order to automatically populate the
family trees of subscribers to their service. But the practice

(01:46):
of death notices goes way further back. The first obituaries
were published in ancient Rome around fifty nine BCE on
papyrus newspapers called daily events, but these notices of death
didn't become prevalent until much later. In newspapers. From before
the eighteen hundreds, ancestry dot com spots could only find
a handful of obituaries per year. A few years later,

(02:09):
the number broke a hundred for the first time. Papers
did regularly publish stories about the deaths of well known
public figures like politicians, wealthy socialites, artists, and other newsmakers,
but those stories written by journalists were distinct from these
shorter death announcements that evolved into the modern obituary. By

(02:30):
the mid eighteen hundreds, newspapers were regularly publishing death notices
submitted by local funeral homes. Before the linotype machine was
invented in eighteen eighty six, every printed letter of every
word printed in the newspaper had to be set by hand,
so papers tended to be short, and obituaries were briefed,
typically around fifty words long, just enough to give the

(02:52):
name of the deceased, the name of a principal surviving
family member, and the date and location of the funeral. Sadly,
infants and young children died in large numbers in the
nineteenth century from illnesses and diseases that we now have
vaccines for. Unlike adult obituaries, which stuck to the facts,

(03:12):
a child's obituary may have included a brief bit of poetry.
For example, this verse from an eighteen fifty one notice
in the Philadelphia Public Ledger about the death of an infant,
Dear Richard's gone to realms above to receive his savior's
dying love. By the height of the Civil War, published
death notices increased to tens of thousands a year. As

(03:35):
more space and attention were given to obituaries, they began
to serve as places for public expressions of mourning. For example,
in the February seventh, eighteen sixty five edition of the
Baltimore Sun, one death notice included a brief eulogy to
a promising young man's life cut short at twenty one years.
The subject of this notice was married, but six weeks

(03:56):
ago he had just embarked in business and possessed the
health and vigor to render it profitable. When the strong
hand of affliction was laid upon him and the form
recently so manly was soon prostrate in death. A further
article this episode is based on how Stuffwork. Spoke with
Genevieve Keiney, a president of the National Museum of Funeral

(04:17):
History in Houston, Texas. She explained the death notices published
in local newspapers also functioned as quasi legal documents because
the newspaper was a public forum. A death announcement served
to notify creditors who might want to file a claim
against the deceased's estate. With the automation of typesetting, newspapers

(04:38):
expanded at the turn of the twentieth century, and more
space could be dedicated to death notices and obituaries. Like
classified advertisements, newspapers charged a fee to publish obituaries, and
publishers quickly realized there was good money to be made
from them. Ancestry dot COM's obituary extractor found an increase
in obituaries from nineteen hundred to the nineteen thirties of

(05:01):
about three hundred percent. It was around this time, in
the nineteen thirties and forties, that the modern obituary template
took shape. Here's where we start to see families in
funeral homes writing death notices that adhere to a familiar
four part structure, a death announcement, short bio survived by
section and funeral information. If you look at the obituary

(05:26):
section of the Richmond Times Dispatch for July third of
nineteen thirty eight, for example, it's a mix of shorter
death notices written by families and longer obituaries written by
staff journalists and wire services like the Associated Press. The
shorter death notices had the deceased person's name of the headline,
while a longer obituary written by the paper might carry

(05:48):
the headline Missus Susan Murdock dies, writes Monday. Some of
the obituaries had pictures that deceased in their youth, a
regular feature of today's obits, one from nineteen thirty eight,
even written after the funeral and shares an account of
the service. That standard template can be a tremendous resource

(06:09):
for experienced genealogists and folks just starting out researching their
family history, as most standard obituaries include the spouse's name,
children's names, including married names for adult daughters, grandchildren's names,
and more. The style remained fairly unchanged throughout the second
half of the nineteen hundreds, but things took a shift

(06:30):
after the attacks on September eleventh of two thousand and one.
Obituary expert Susan Sopper explained to NPR in twenty eighteen
that in the months following the attacks, the New York
Times published short narrative obituaries on each of the nearly
three thousand people killed that day. She said they were fabulous.

(06:50):
Everyone was recognized as a whole person, and they had
fun anecdotes. They made you cry, they made you smile,
And to me, that was sort of when the tide
turned in abituary and people realized that you could bring
a person to life and keep them alive in even
a short written bio. Soaper theorized that these obituaries started

(07:10):
a trend toward more honesty and openness and remembrances instead
of using coded language like he died at home or
she died suddenly. Families were opening up about how things
like addiction or clinical depression took a loved one's life
and including previously taboo details such as queer partners and
children born out of wetlock. Families now use the space

(07:34):
to talk about the passions and dreams of the deceased,
and a few obituaries even go so far as to
say that the deceased will not be missed. Today's episode
is based on the article how obituaries went from dry
death notices to tributes to truth on how stuffworks dot com,

(07:55):
written by Dave Ruse. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio
in partnership with how stuffworks dot com and was produced
by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.