Updated 12 October 2026: added How do you use an obituary to find relatives? (what obituaries name, which record to check next, where to search old obituaries) and two FAQs.
Updated 8 October 2026: added FreeBMD, FreeREG, IrishGenealogy.ie, Portale Antenati, Reclaim The Records, Tribute Archive, Deceased Online (paid) and Steve Morse One-Step; Chronicling America search now points to its new loc.gov home; Echovita links to its search page (the old name-search URL stopped working).
What Vital Records Can You Search Online for Free?
Vital records — birth certificates, death records, marriage licenses, and divorce decrees — are the foundational documents of genealogy, legal proceedings, and identity verification. While certified copies typically require proof of eligibility, a vast ecosystem of free online indexes, obituary databases, cemetery records, and reunion registries makes it possible to locate and verify vital record information without cost.
Where Can You Search Obituaries for Free?
Obituaries remain one of the richest sources of biographical information available to researchers. Legacy.com hosts over 200 million obituaries and is the most comprehensive digital obituary archive in the world. Legacy.com aggregates obituaries from over 2,800 newspapers and 12,500 funeral homes, making it the largest free obituary search engine in the United States. For historical obituaries, the Library of Congress's Chronicling America project has digitized newspapers dating back to 1789. GenealogyBank maintains over 316 million newspaper obituary records spanning 327 years across 16,000 publications.
How Do You Find a Death Record Online?
Death records are searchable through several free indexes. The Social Security Death Index (SSDI), maintained by the Social Security Administration and containing over 100 million records, available on FamilySearch, contains over 94 million records of deaths reported to the Social Security Administration from 1935 to 2014. DeathIndexes.com maintains a comprehensive state-by-state directory of online death indexes, death certificate databases, and burial records. Many individual states also publish their own searchable death indexes through their vital records offices.
Cemetery & Grave Records
Cemetery and grave records have been revolutionized by volunteer-driven projects. Find a Grave, now owned by Ancestry, hosts over 226 million memorials with headstone photos and biographical data contributed by volunteers worldwide. BillionGraves specializes in GPS-tagged headstone records, making it possible to locate exact gravesite positions. The Veterans Affairs National Gravesite Locator covers over 3 million veterans' burials since the Civil War.
Adoption & Reunion
Adoption records occupy a unique space in vital records research. While original birth certificates and adoption files are typically sealed by court order, mutual consent reunion registries allow adoptees and birth parents to find each other. The International Soundex Reunion Registry (ISRR), operating since 1975, is the oldest and largest free registry of its kind. DNA testing through services like AncestryDNA and 23andMe has become the most effective modern tool for adoption reunions, with millions of genetic matches facilitating family connections.
Marriage & Divorce Records
Marriage and divorce records are maintained at the county and state level. The CDC's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) — which has compiled vital statistics data since 1933 — statistics publishes a "Where to Write for Vital Records" guide linking to every state's vital records office. FamilySearch offers free searchable indexes for historical marriage records across most states. County clerk offices often maintain online searchable marriage license databases for recent records.
How do you use an obituary to find relatives?
Treat the obituary as a list of leads, then confirm each lead in a record. FamilySearch says obituaries vary, but can give the full name, birth and death dates, names of family members, service details and place of burial FamilySearch (read 12 Oct 2026). Its newspaper guide adds that obituaries “often mention surviving relatives”. Its worked example lists daughters under married names, gives one daughter’s town and shows which children died first FamilySearch Wiki (read 12 Oct 2026).
| What the obituary names | Where to check it next |
|---|---|
| Surviving spouse and children, with married names | Death and marriage records for each person. In FamilySearch’s example, a brother’s death certificate identified the parents FamilySearch Wiki. |
| Towns where survivors live | Census records for that place, and newspapers in nearby counties FamilySearch Wiki. |
| Relatives who died earlier (“predeceased by”) | Their own obituaries and death indexes; run each name through the search box above. |
| Funeral home | The funeral home itself: FamilySearch says it “may also help in locating an obituary” FamilySearch Wiki. |
| Cemetery or burial place | The cemetery office’s burial records, or a visit to see “which family members are buried together”. Find a Grave and BillionGraves are volunteer-based and not necessarily complete Library of Congress (read 12 Oct 2026). |
| Property or an estate the person left | Probate records, usually at the county courthouse. They can name the spouse, children, parents, siblings and in-laws, with their places of residence FamilySearch Wiki (read 12 Oct 2026). |
Searching by last name. Old newspapers often referred to people by last name only. The Library of Congress suggests proximity search over exact phrases, plus common misspellings, because scanned text has OCR errors (mistakes from automatic text recognition) Library of Congress blog (read 12 Oct 2026). Add start and end dates to cut the results.
Where to search obituaries, recent and old:
- Recent deaths: check the funeral home’s own website. Legacy.com’s obituary search filters by country, state, city, newspaper and funeral home Legacy.com (read 12 Oct 2026).
- Old obituaries: the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America holds “millions of newspaper pages published through 1963” from all 50 states, DC, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands Library of Congress (read 12 Oct 2026).
- Library obituary indexes: the Ohio Obituary Index at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library had “over 3,700,000 entries” in 2019, about 90% newspaper citations, from the 1830s to today. It charges a small fee for copies Hayes Presidential Library (read 12 Oct 2026). Washington State Library’s guide points to the Washington State Digital Archives cemetery records, which do “not include all of the cemeteries in the state” Washington State Library (read 12 Oct 2026).
- FamilySearch: search for the person in its historical records; some obituary collections are digitized but not yet indexed, so browse the images too FamilySearch.
Use the names of living relatives responsibly. Survivors named in an obituary are living people, often grieving. Contact them once, politely, and stop if they ask. Never use an obituary or these records to decide on someone’s employment, housing, credit or insurance. The Fair Credit Reporting Act “protects information collected by consumer reporting agencies” FTC (read 12 Oct 2026), and Max Intel is not one. For voter-list rules before you look up a relative’s address, see Can I look up someone’s voter registration?
Next step: search the deceased’s name in the box at the top, then follow the cemetery and probate leads in the table.
Sources for this section: FamilySearch, Find obituaries on FamilySearch; FamilySearch Wiki, United States Death Information in Newspapers; FamilySearch Wiki, United States Obituaries; FamilySearch Wiki, United States Probate Records; Library of Congress, Genealogy Basics; Library of Congress, Chronicling America: About the Collection; Library of Congress, Tips for Searching in Chronicling America; Hayes Presidential Library, History and Scope of the Ohio Obituary Index; Washington State Library, Cemetery Records guide; Legacy.com obituary search; FTC, Fair Credit Reporting Act. All read 12 October 2026.