Ancestry.com obituary searches upgraded

Ancestry.com has updated and expanded their obituaries. Part of the announcement said "Improved Obituary Collection (Twice as many obituaries now added regularly and more fields available for improved search results.)."

I immediately did a search and found the new fields to be what I needed! For a community study, I needed to do some searches in a given location and did so without a name of the person or the newspaper. I did use the state name and added the name of the city as a keyword. I knew that a newspaper from the city I needed is not part of the obituary collection, so just used it as the keyword, I added some other parameters and a goldmine was my reward. I found obituaries for former and current residents and relatives in newspapers published in other places. It is also great for surname studies.

The obituary search includes fields for names, places and dates of death, birth and marriage (with the ability to search for a span of years), keywords, location of newspaper (country, state if in the U.S.,and city, and by the name of the newspaper.

The obituary searches are available with U.S. Deluxe and World Deluxe memberships.