Local History: Obituary File

One of the things I'm creating as a resource at the Gunter Library & Museum is an obituary file. I will be clipping obituaries from local newspapers and placing them in a file box at the library. If anyone has any to contribute, please drop them by the Gunter Library when possible. Most libraries that have local history departments have obituary files. Family researchers use them to verify family dates and relationships. Some libraries have digitized their files and others keep them in file boxes alphabetically. Such files are sometimes the only records available for family researchers.

The Obituary Times on rootsweb.com has an index of obituaries. Go to www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~obituary/ and type in the name you are looking for. I put in a search for "Gunter" and brought up not only all those with a surname of Gunter, but names of all those who had died in Gunter, Texas. This list seems to go back only to the year 2000. However, when I searched my father's surname, it included surnames for 1998 and 1999. It did not include my mother who died in May 2010. Each citation includes name, age, place of death, name of newspaper where obituary was published and the date it was published.