My grandmother collected obituaries. I imagine as one gets to be a certain age, it is kind of inevitable to have a collection of them. After she passed away, my uncle sorted through them. Some he couldn’t figure out why she had kept. Some were former colleagues, or family members of former colleagues. One obituary she had kept was a person she had never met who had died of a condition she herself had survived.

When I went to sort through the box of pictures she also left, I could see why she liked obituaries so much. The few pictures she had managed to label had stories on them. A picture of her husband and her sister at his birthday party also mentioned my cousin who was born on the same day, although I doubt he was born when the original photo was taken. A picture of her uncle mentions the TV that also happened to be in the picture, and whom she gave it to after the uncle passed away. I understood why she didn’t label her pictures – there was never enough room on the back of the picture to write down all the things that came to mind when she looked at it. Some people had little patience for my grandmother’s rambling stories, but I loved how her mind worked and how it made connections between things that people with a more linear mindset would never think of. I believe the reason I love genealogy so much is because I inherited some of that way of thinking. Case in point, genealogists love obituaries as much as my grandmother did. Not only do they usually contain a picture, they also have the person’s life story, key dates, and family members in them. All of the connections are right there in one document.

My uncle put all the remaining obituaries in a photo album which my family affectionately called “The Book of the Dead.” I had just started my foray into genealogy when my grandmother passed, and I found this book invaluable as I began to create a family tree, especially since the obituaries named living relatives I had never met. If I were to ask someone what the best way to invade someone’s privacy is, I’m sure an obituary wouldn’t even make the list. However, when I work to help adoptees connect with their biological families, one of the main tools I use is obituaries. If I am trying to fill out a family tree, a quick internet search with the name of the person, the year they passed away, and their location will usually bring up an obituary (especially if they had an obituary published after 2002). While a lot of people are up in arms about Facebook and privacy, I have never heard a person consider how they are compromising their privacy by appearing in an obituary.

I don’t want to be the privacy bogeyman, and I certainly hope this doesn’t make anyone reconsider memorializing a loved one with an obituary (although everyone would do well to check their Facebook privacy settings). It would be a different story if the company that publishes the obituaries online was actively using your data for profit. While I do want people to consider the ways in which traditional privacy-busters are considered acceptable, I mostly just wanted to muse about how my grandmother recognized how incredibly useful obituaries are.