FIND OUT ABOUT PEOPLE
(Note: This is the 2nd page of this series. For the first page, FIND INFORMATION ON PEOPLE)
To find out about people, you will perhaps need to find an obituary in the newspaper. For that, you will need the specific death dates. Usually, the obituary will be published a few days after the death. The information in the newspaper will vary, but more than often you will get names of surviving family members and sometimes even names of friends, in addition to the cause of death.
To find out about people in a genealogical search, obituaries are very important for clues and are valuable information. But keep in mind that not every small newspaper has been archived. For example, the Los Angeles Times is archived online and is accessible through major libraries. However, a small newspaper located in the outskirts of Kansas may not have the same access. The bad news is that records of smaller city newspapers may not have survived the years; no one archived those records. Furthermore, if those old newspapers do exist, it may be on microfilm, just rolls and rolls identifiable by months and years. There most likely will not be any sort of indexing where you can find an article or obituary on someone simply by looking up the name of the individual. This does make doing a people search a little more challenging.
To find out about people, you will simply need to find the dates first. And if you are out of the area, the reference librarian at the local public library will search for you, if you are nice and patient with your request. For example, if you provide the date of death and if it was published in the particular local newspaper, you will find the obituary; the librarian will get you the information. Furthermore, if you know that the subject of your people search made the front page of the local newspaper on such and such date, librarian can also pull up that article on the microfilm for you.
Larger public libraries and university libraries will have paid Internet resources (databases), which may help to you with your people search. For example, many public libraries and university libraries have subscriptions to “Ancestry” that you can use for free in the library. This resource could help you to locate census information on your subject’s family, which will give you vital leads.
Lastly, libraries will have other intangible resources to help you find people for free. For example, you could check out a book on how to do an ancestry search, a book on how to look up records, and so much more. Books are great for pointing people in the right direction. Furthermore, libraries will also have training for this sort of thing. For example, many larger public libraries will have a genealogy department and that department will hold training sessions on how to do an ancestor search.
If you want to find out about people and your project is going to be an involved project, the best advice is to get to know your local librarian. Librarians and libraries are invaluable resources for you –and it is all FREE!
