I left my hometown of San Diego 20 years ago. I like to keep abreast of Obituary listings, because reasons.
The only comprehensive notices have always been the San Diego Union, which charges outrageous prices for the privilege of posting a death notice. When my mother died six years ago the cost for adding one photo to her eight line obit was well over a thousand dollars.
So I’m not surprised to see a huge reduction in the number of obits that now appear in the SDU’s online edition lately.
My question is: Where is there a comprehensive online source for current obituary notices in San Diego County? Just about everywhere I’ve looked directs me to Legacy which I’ve always found extremely disappointing.
I would suggest contacting a professional librarian in San Diego and ask them the best way to access area obituaries. Librarians are amazing at providing no cost access to information, absolutely amazing. Most of them delight at opening up free information to people.
It would be very unusual of them to require you to hold a library card in their system, but if they do, contact a librarian in your system and ask them the same question. Your tax dollars at work.
Disappointingly few listings? Disappointing content of the listings that are there?
Before I retired, I was heavily involved in (large urban) newspaper advertising, and from a number of years before that we had been using Legacy for the online versions of all our funeral notices/death notices, and for those who complained about the print prices*, we referred them to the Legacy site so they could publish online only at a much lower cost. From what I knew, pretty much all newspapers were following that example. Legacy is pretty much the only game in town, or was when I retired.
*Print cost is high for a major newspaper because you are paying for a huge circulation (that you probably don’t need). Newspapers are businesses, after all, not public servants. The high cost of print is why Craig’s List ate our lunch regarding classified advertising. Paid funeral/death notices resisted that trend for a while, but when Legacy came along, that tended to push that kind of advertising along the same path.
One exception for print in some communities is if there is a “paper of record” for legal notices, they sometimes also have funeral notices for a much lower rate than the large urban newspaper.
A note on terminology, the way we used it in the business: a death notice was a paid 2- or 3-line notice that someone had died, including the name, probably the age, and the location where they died. A paid funeral notice added the location and timing of the funeral, requests about flowers etc., plus whatever information about the deceased that the family was willing to pay for. An obituary was a free news story, done at the discretion of the news department (i.e. you could not “order” one) that required that the deceased person be newsworthy. This is not intended as a prescriptive use of these words, just to be sure we are on the same page.
I haven’t looked at Legacy for quite some time, but it seemed to me that for SD County obituaries, Legacy and the SD Union simply mirrored each other. I guess I’ll have to give Legacy another look. I find it odd that a city as large as SD would have a total of three obituaries over a period of several days (My impression, I haven’t actually counted). It seems to me that until recently there had always been many more obits in any given time frame.
I’m not to proud to wonder if I’m just plain wrong about this. It does sound like Legacy is The place. By the way, thanks for clarifying the terminology. Edit: I have been confusing obituaries with death notices.
That should not be a surprise. From Wikipedia, “Legacy.com hosts obituaries for more than three-quarters of the 100 largest newspapers in the U.S., by circulation.”
Good idea! My sister, still in San Diego, works in publishing. Come to think of it she spent 13 years as a writer at the SD Union. Didn’t occur to me to ask her.
My impression is that fewer people are publishing traditional death notices of any sort these days . I just checked the local weekly newspaper of the neighborhood where I grew up - 4 death notices in the latest issue. I checked a 1990 issue- there were 16 and a 1963 issue has 37. I suspect it has something to do with people being more mobile - if I die at 80 in a place I moved to last year and I’ve lived in four different towns as an adult , where would my death notice be published that people who know me will see it ? The local newspaper where I’ve lived for a year? The four towns I’ve lived in ? but I’m not the only person who moved. How many people who knew me in 1985 are still living in the same town where we both lived? The best way to get the information out would be for my kid to put the information on Facebook and tag me. Then it will get to almost everyone I’m still in touch with and spread from there. That’s the main way I’ve been finding out about deaths for the past decade or so - I get a personal phone call for the closest of friends or relatives as has always been the case but I haven’t found out someone died via a printed death notice in in at least a decade. I used to check the local obits every week, because that was how I would find out that a childhood friend’s mother or a former neighbor died. Even if that neighbor had moved away, it would have been published if the neighbor had lived in that neighborhood for a substantial amount of time. Now - the funeral info gets on Facebook and if I’m still in contact with anyone who is still in contact (and so on) I will find out. Just as an example, a couple of years ago I found out that my high school boyfriend passed away. I hadn’t been in contact with him in 40 years. Although I still lived near where we grew up , he had moved away about 25 years before so no death notice was published in that local weekly. Someone who was still in contact with him or his family in real life posted the funeral information on Facebook and it got to a group of his junior high school friends. One of whom went to high school with me and since she and I were friends , that’s how I found out.
I think it’s going to cause a huge problem for people trying to research their family trees in the future because you can check SS death notices etc, but those don’t have as much information as newspaper/legacy death notices have about survivors, where the deceased lived and so on. Sometimes the only way you can tell one Reinhard Schneider from another is by the list of survivors.
You could try the websites of all the funeral homes in the city (of course SD likely has quite a few). I’ve never seen the hide the obits behind a paywall.
I have a related question to the OP. Is publishing an obit a legal requirement? If so, at what government level? If not, I can see that some people might decide to NOT have their obit published. If they tried to be anonymous all their life, why stop at death?
I doubt publishing an obit is legally required anywhere - I know for sure it isn’t where I live. But they still won’t be completely anonymous - at some point, they will be included in the SS death index
I think there was another discussion here lately about this, but it boils down to the cost of putting an a typical couple paragraph length obituary with a little bio and a list of surviving relatives into a local newspaper (even just online) has increased a lot in recent years, so “no one”/“very few people” do it anymore. When I try to hunt down obituaries for people on the fringes of my family tree I often find them on funeral home websites.
Totally agree with you but I’ll add on to it a bit. When I was a Spiderboy & dead tree news was a regular thing, death notices were right there; they were as simple as turning a page & ma would read 'em looking for names that she knew from the local area. I’ve only ever gone on Legacy when I’m looking for a specific death notice, I heard about someone I know passing & wanted to find out more details - when & where is the funeral. I wouldn’t know if someone had passed by looking at Legacy unless I had known about it from other sources. I don’t even know, can you search by small regional area - the town I grew up in & the surrounding x towns, but not even the whole county?
IOW, it’s a chicken & egg thing; I wouldn’t tell my family to post it there because I don’t think people read 'em like they used to. I also don’t do FB so she’ll keep me updated about people we know but I’ll probably never find out about old classmates & former cow-orkers.
10 years ago I used this site to find my Grandfather’s grave. Story way too long to go into but short version: my (long deceased) Dad died at 67 never having met his father. Had only scant info about him but decades later it was enough for a modern computer search.
BTW, my Sister the magazine editor and erstwhile San Diego Union writer, suggested I restrict my routine scans of the Notice/Obits to Sunday editions. Duh! Hadn’t occurred to me. At least all four notices will be easy to peruse.
Well, I just looked at the Sunday obits. A few more. Looks like people just aren’t willing to pay for the privilege any more. My Sister says the huge decline in revenue for today’s newspapers means “outrageous” prices for Death Notices and Obits.
Your sister is right. It’s not uncommon for a big city newspaper to charge $1,000 or more for a simple death notice. If the family puts a notice in the paper at all, it’s most likely just the name, and a direction to to the funeral home’s website for more information.