Obit Mining

This is a technique I came up with while discussing networks with my son. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. When it works you can read obits for a given date. The oldest pages saved I've seen date back to 1998. For older obits you have to pay the newspaper. This is a very 'hit and miss' technique but you might find something you're looking for.

1. Discover the name of the newspaper site you want to look at obits on, e.g. www.mynewz.com. You can do this by Googleing the town name plus 'news', e.g. austin news. Google should show you a dropdown of choices, one of which would be austin newspaper. Copy the URL, but only as much as the name and the '.com' portion. It is better to leave off any reference to 'index' or whatever.

2. Navigate to http://archive.org

3. At the top of the page, center, there is a search box for the WayBack Machine. Paste in the URL you copied and click search.

4. The search will return all the pages of the paper, sorted by years, stored by the server, if any. Select the date you're interested in.

5. Hopefully, the server will display the page for the selected date.

6. Find the link to obits and click it. If you're lucky you will see the obits as they appeared for that day. Cool...

NOTE: some papers have their obits behind a 'paywall.' So you won't be able to see them.