> An unfortunate side effect of this move to digital-only obits will likely only become apparent a few decades from now, and it will likely frustrate the next few generations of genealogists hunting for records of early 21st century ancestors.
> Print newspapers were well suited for both the distribution and preservation of obituaries. Distribution isn’t a problem for digital obituaries, and in many ways the web is better than print in this respect. But when it comes to preservation, there are many factors that make digital obits in their current state particularly susceptible to rot.
What we have already lost is the process of reading the newspapers that birthed the obituary.
Newspaper's used to have strong local coverage and a collection of vignettes into the outside world. The way the author uses the obituaries is the way I used to use the newspapers. Getting multiple newspapers (and magazines) from all over the world was a fixture for New York City creative offices pre-internet.
I think the idea from the original article is great! But although I'm a fan of printed newspapers and even subscribe to a renowned one, I unfortunately can't take part in it, simply because in my cultural circle (Germany) there are no detailed obituaries of ordinary people in the newspaper, only death notices. But that's always been the case here - at least that's how I know it.
The Internet Archive is massive force for good and a huge not-for profit effort.
However in certain aspects of preservation of History (for example if deemed high value at a national level) we should also expect national archives to duplicate the effort to preserve this and other information with historic value.
The Internet Archive is constantly under attack for daring to preserve pressure waves. One of these days the destruction will be successful. Probably right now, under a Republican landslide government.
> There is a real danger that obituaries of people in the early 21st century will become inaccessible to future generations due to obituary rot:
When my father died we got a 'complementary' online posting from the funeral home for ~1 year (for funeral/service details), but I also made the effort to pay to put one in the newspaper for posterity.
When my mother-in-law died, I immediately registered a domain for her name and created a website and added the obituary, eulogy, and a photo gallery and shared that with friends and family for exactly this reason.
Companies that aggregate and sell data suck up all of the obituaries as they are public record and unburdened by regulations on sharing and selling it. Although it may not be in its original form (as far as I know), info from obituaries may actually be positioned to survive a very long time.
There's a danger, but also a natural way of things. Why should we default to records being accessible in perpetuity?
Mind I can get behind the genealogy argument, yet feel that our post-life records being accessible by default is not an assumption we can make unilaterally.
> Why should we default to records being accessible in perpetuity?
The historical record is important and we don't know what will be useful to future generations.
Take Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms as an example. It briefly recounts the multiple legal proceedings that the Roman Catholic Church brought against a humble Italian Renaissance-era miller who spread strange, heretical ideas about the cosmos (involving the cheese that was apparently the moon's substance and the worms that ate it). Ginzburg draws on Church records, including the man's own written defense, and builds a fascinating picture of his mental world, intellect, and disposition.
If I remember correctly, these small, cloudy windows into the Early Modern past even let Ginzburg identify likely traces of pre-Christian, or folk, traditions largely hidden from the written record.
This is a funny example, I suppose, because in all likelihood the miller would have been tickled to know that his ideas survived and found an audience not just despite but because of Church persecution.
Still, his case nicely illustrates the importance and unpredictable value of the historical record.
It's really hard to find stuff from the "old internet" on google. I know it's there. But instead it feeds me garbage marketing articles that just touch the surface and then try to sell me something.
I suggest trying Yandex, no joke. It feels like 2005 Google - no industry forced filtering or rerouting, no BS recipe sites boosted by SEO and "time on page" manipulation...
wiby.me, marginalia.nu, and kagi.com seem to do a better job at this. Wiby is specific to old web, and even has a delightful "Surprise me" button that can take you to some fun little websites that provide an insight into someone's life.
Here's what currently happens: obit links get passed around among friends, family, loved ones. Anyone who catches wind of a death and is remotely interested in family history/geneaology is going to archive it and plug it in somewhere. Such as Find-a-Grave, ancestry.com, etc. Ancestry themselves should be actively indexing all these obits and such.
Digital obits will last so long that you will hate them forever, and curse the day they wrote yours.
Because here's what's going to happen next: every "data point" in those obits will be plugged into databases. Family Trees, Find-a-Grave Memorials, personal ancestral files. Those will be indexed, searchable, and every single factoid will be repeated and reduplicated and copy-pasted in perpetuity.
Unfortunately, anyone who reads obits and knows some family history also knows that obits are riddled with errors. Sometimes they're deliberate! Sometimes they misdirect or protect the innocent, minors, whatever. Sometimes they're spiteful and sometimes they're simply papering over scandal with something anodyne.
So you've got a 95% true obituary that's being traded and scraped and plugged into databases, and those 5% falsehoods are going to multiply like a pernicious cancer.
Once I delved into my family tree, I found that most of my effort and resources were in disproving connections, removing sources, and reconciling conflicts due to inept researchers who didn't check anything. I hacked off entire "trunks" due to false bloodlines (usually to Revolutionary heroes, nobility, notables, etc.)
Let's get real here: obituaries were published in newspapers! Newspapers are periodicals designed to last only as long as you read them, and then you wrap fish in them and toss them on the fireplace! Don't get so precious about these fleeting words. Because many people will care far too much, preserve them with undue care, and we'll be worse off than before.
You only live as long as the last person to remember you. Now the internet is going to make us all immortal as our descendants research the family tree.
Obits are among my idea-stirring hacks. Some thoughts on why they work, and some similar ones.
Obits are written long in advance. I noticed following Jorge Bergoglio's death that NPR's obit was written (and voiced, in the newscast / headlines) by Silvia Poggioli, though she'd retired from the network in 2023 (here: <https://www.npr.org/2025/04/21/1013050313/pope-francis-dead>). This means that they're both well-researched and polished writing, unlike most breaking news coverage. They also compress a lifetime into a few paragraphs (~75 in the case of Poggioli's article), which tends to bring out highlights.
Another format that often brings out interesting ideas, outside my own area of expertise: interviews. Especially with those not from the worlds of politics or mainstream business. All the better, historical interviews, from earlier times. These often give either perspectives on a different world, or a perspective on circumstances which presage the world we find ourselves in now.
Terry Gross's "Fresh Air" and the Studs Terkel archive are two particularly excellent examples. As I'm expanding my language comprehension, interviews and histories in foreign languages are another excellent option.
A third option: academic author interviews. The New Books Network has poor production values (bonus: well-produced audio is almost certainly a skippable ad) and a large number of duds, but where it hits the topics are almost always well outside the mainstream but at the same time the product of expertise. There's a huge back-catalogue:
There's another outstanding use of obituaries - genealogy research.
My paternal grandfather had some issues with his racial lineage and left home at a very early age after his dad died to join the military to fight in Korea. For whatever reason he ended up adopting a name he was not born under - his father's - and kept it a secret his whole life and didn't tell a soul. it wasn't uncovered what he had done until decades later when his mother died and his birth certificate was found in her belongings.
When trying to figure out who his dad's family was, where no one in the family really had any idea and in the past they had a lot of incentive to hide their ancestry and keep their records inaccurate/incomplete (this was during one-drop law times, where people would hide marriages and assume fake identities all the time to avoid persecution). I was stuck for months until someone mentioned using newspapers.com archive to try to see if anything came up (not a plug, this service is genuinely amazing).
Jackpot! Public records often lie, but obituaries rarely do. I was able to piece together his paternal side's relatives via obituaries (who leave surviving relative names quite often) and found his precise lineage all the way back to the 1850's and before emancipation, something that is typically quite hard to do. Could not have possibly done it without obituaries.
People are always surprised at what can be unearthed if you cast a wide net and start pulling on threads, even if only to rule certain threads out early on. Nice work.
And Russia! Let's not forget the same holds there, for very good reasons. Particularly as they managed to be the leaders of the unpopular men leading America, and they're squandering what wealth Russia has in mad imperialism for purely ego reasons while also seeking to crash the US no matter what that does to the world economy. Pure table-flipping.
It's called the Swan Lake moment: Swan Lake on loop on the state media TV. That's what happens when everything is turmoil and nobody knows what will come next.
> It’s not just about learning new facts, of course — it’s about asking questions. Why was a British mystic in Mexico City? How did Spanish-language television evolve in the U.S.? What led someone to invent PLAX or build search tools for financial news decades before Google? Even if you don’t find all the answers, just posing the questions helps you flex the creative muscle that thrives on curiosity and connection.
Maybe wait until you have at least 1 anecdote, anywhere in the history of the world, of major creativity from reading an obituary, before recommending it?
Goddang, it’s not like they’re giving medical advice or anything, it’s simply about being exposed to novel concepts and ideas, which fosters creativity. You don’t really need “evidence” for this, but even if somehow it’s wrong and reading obituaries either somehow does not increase or decreases creativity, is not like there’s harm in saying “Hey, try reading some obituaries, you might learn some interesting stuff”
But that's not what they're saying. They're claiming it's a creativity hack, not that you might learn some interesting stuff. That's the entire thesis of the post... which isn't backed up at all.
Completely agreed. It's just irresponsibly bad writing to claim "this can boost your creativity!" without even a single example of how it has boosted yours or someone else's. I don't need a scientific study, but surely you can give at least a single anecdotal example? Because if you can't, you honestly shouldn't be writing this in the first place.
If it helps them, that seems sufficient reason to share what works for them. I'd say that a more kind critique would be that their advice could be expanded to: "Read anything" in order to get creativity going. But gatekeeping advice unless they can cite "major creativity" that came from it seems harsh.
When they claim up front that it's a "creativity hack", yes I expect would expect them to back it up. That's not gatekeeping or harsh, it's literally the one job of an article to back up its claim.
I enjoy reading obituaries, for a number of reasons. (Mostly in the NYT, but also, of course, the famous Economist obits.) But I rarely have ever gotten any creative ideas from them, and I do not recall hearing about anyone else doing so either.
And I object in principle to telling silly stories about desirable activities to try to justify them. This is how we get bad ideas like 'Mozart for babies' or 'we should make kids play chess because it correlates with being smarter'. Chess should be played for its intrinsic value, because if it can only be justified by its instrumental value in raising IQ or grades, the case for that was weak, much weaker than its proponents were willing to admit, and has since turned out to be false - but along the way, wasted a lot of time and money and made a lot of kids miserable playing a game they didn't like, and the proponents just made the world a worse place by wasting all those resources, filling the literature with useless analyses and research on chess correlates, and decreasing public trust in science.
I think its hardly that much of an interesting idea. Reading wide ofcourse is useful and interesting. But I doubt reading obituaries are the best way to go about that.
One approach that I often do, is to go to fivebooks.com when an any random subject or topic strikes me and then try to read the books their interviewees have recommended on that topic. I have found many interesting books in this way.
Like their lists about the Spanish Civil war lead me to 'Forging of a Rebel' by Arturo Barea.
Another source is to look into famous/interesting peoples reading lists. Many famous people including Gandhi, Tolstoy and others kept lists of all books that they read.
I like obits as much as the next person, maybe more. But the premise of the piece very much depends on a particular definition of creativity; and then tries, and fails, to extend it to reading obits. If it's defined as something novel, then a priori it can't be obvious and therefore is likely to be an association between distant concepts - a statement of the obvious. Mednick might be right; but an extrapolation to obits, as in the original piece, is unjustified, and definitely unproven. Velcro wasn't invented because someone read an obit; it's good, impressive, but just regular creativity. Gentner posits an obvious truism, but its relationship to obits is tenuous at best, again unjustified, and just probably wrong.
The whole piece would be begging the question were there a question. It's a statement of faith.
I have a lifelong friend who is a very successful investor and who has been habitually reading obits since his high school days. I recall his explaining that obits served as an opportunity radar.
I don't do it, but consider this: obituaries are clearly capsules of what people consider valuable and worthy about a person. This has nothing to do with whether they're true, or plausible: they're little windows into what one would consider surpassingly important.
It's like the saying about the Velvet Underground: 'very few people came to their concerts but everyone who did, started a band'.
Readit News
https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/obituary-rot.html
> An unfortunate side effect of this move to digital-only obits will likely only become apparent a few decades from now, and it will likely frustrate the next few generations of genealogists hunting for records of early 21st century ancestors.
> Print newspapers were well suited for both the distribution and preservation of obituaries. Distribution isn’t a problem for digital obituaries, and in many ways the web is better than print in this respect. But when it comes to preservation, there are many factors that make digital obits in their current state particularly susceptible to rot.
Newspaper's used to have strong local coverage and a collection of vignettes into the outside world. The way the author uses the obituaries is the way I used to use the newspapers. Getting multiple newspapers (and magazines) from all over the world was a fixture for New York City creative offices pre-internet.
None of those are guaranteed to be around in 50 years, but hopefully it helps a little.
However in certain aspects of preservation of History (for example if deemed high value at a national level) we should also expect national archives to duplicate the effort to preserve this and other information with historic value.
When my father died we got a 'complementary' online posting from the funeral home for ~1 year (for funeral/service details), but I also made the effort to pay to put one in the newspaper for posterity.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot
Mind I can get behind the genealogy argument, yet feel that our post-life records being accessible by default is not an assumption we can make unilaterally.
The historical record is important and we don't know what will be useful to future generations.
Take Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms as an example. It briefly recounts the multiple legal proceedings that the Roman Catholic Church brought against a humble Italian Renaissance-era miller who spread strange, heretical ideas about the cosmos (involving the cheese that was apparently the moon's substance and the worms that ate it). Ginzburg draws on Church records, including the man's own written defense, and builds a fascinating picture of his mental world, intellect, and disposition.
If I remember correctly, these small, cloudy windows into the Early Modern past even let Ginzburg identify likely traces of pre-Christian, or folk, traditions largely hidden from the written record.
This is a funny example, I suppose, because in all likelihood the miller would have been tickled to know that his ideas survived and found an audience not just despite but because of Church persecution.
Still, his case nicely illustrates the importance and unpredictable value of the historical record.
> inaccessible to future generations
No, it's not going to go down this way.
Here's what currently happens: obit links get passed around among friends, family, loved ones. Anyone who catches wind of a death and is remotely interested in family history/geneaology is going to archive it and plug it in somewhere. Such as Find-a-Grave, ancestry.com, etc. Ancestry themselves should be actively indexing all these obits and such.
Digital obits will last so long that you will hate them forever, and curse the day they wrote yours.
Because here's what's going to happen next: every "data point" in those obits will be plugged into databases. Family Trees, Find-a-Grave Memorials, personal ancestral files. Those will be indexed, searchable, and every single factoid will be repeated and reduplicated and copy-pasted in perpetuity.
https://m.xkcd.com/2106/
Unfortunately, anyone who reads obits and knows some family history also knows that obits are riddled with errors. Sometimes they're deliberate! Sometimes they misdirect or protect the innocent, minors, whatever. Sometimes they're spiteful and sometimes they're simply papering over scandal with something anodyne.
So you've got a 95% true obituary that's being traded and scraped and plugged into databases, and those 5% falsehoods are going to multiply like a pernicious cancer.
Once I delved into my family tree, I found that most of my effort and resources were in disproving connections, removing sources, and reconciling conflicts due to inept researchers who didn't check anything. I hacked off entire "trunks" due to false bloodlines (usually to Revolutionary heroes, nobility, notables, etc.)
Let's get real here: obituaries were published in newspapers! Newspapers are periodicals designed to last only as long as you read them, and then you wrap fish in them and toss them on the fireplace! Don't get so precious about these fleeting words. Because many people will care far too much, preserve them with undue care, and we'll be worse off than before.
Obits are written long in advance. I noticed following Jorge Bergoglio's death that NPR's obit was written (and voiced, in the newscast / headlines) by Silvia Poggioli, though she'd retired from the network in 2023 (here: <https://www.npr.org/2025/04/21/1013050313/pope-francis-dead>). This means that they're both well-researched and polished writing, unlike most breaking news coverage. They also compress a lifetime into a few paragraphs (~75 in the case of Poggioli's article), which tends to bring out highlights.
Another format that often brings out interesting ideas, outside my own area of expertise: interviews. Especially with those not from the worlds of politics or mainstream business. All the better, historical interviews, from earlier times. These often give either perspectives on a different world, or a perspective on circumstances which presage the world we find ourselves in now.
Terry Gross's "Fresh Air" and the Studs Terkel archive are two particularly excellent examples. As I'm expanding my language comprehension, interviews and histories in foreign languages are another excellent option.
A third option: academic author interviews. The New Books Network has poor production values (bonus: well-produced audio is almost certainly a skippable ad) and a large number of duds, but where it hits the topics are almost always well outside the mainstream but at the same time the product of expertise. There's a huge back-catalogue:
<https://newbooksnetwork.com/>
My paternal grandfather had some issues with his racial lineage and left home at a very early age after his dad died to join the military to fight in Korea. For whatever reason he ended up adopting a name he was not born under - his father's - and kept it a secret his whole life and didn't tell a soul. it wasn't uncovered what he had done until decades later when his mother died and his birth certificate was found in her belongings.
When trying to figure out who his dad's family was, where no one in the family really had any idea and in the past they had a lot of incentive to hide their ancestry and keep their records inaccurate/incomplete (this was during one-drop law times, where people would hide marriages and assume fake identities all the time to avoid persecution). I was stuck for months until someone mentioned using newspapers.com archive to try to see if anything came up (not a plug, this service is genuinely amazing).
Jackpot! Public records often lie, but obituaries rarely do. I was able to piece together his paternal side's relatives via obituaries (who leave surviving relative names quite often) and found his precise lineage all the way back to the 1850's and before emancipation, something that is typically quite hard to do. Could not have possibly done it without obituaries.
A guy keeps going to the newsagent: he scans the headlines and then leaves.
The newsagent sees him do this a few days in a row and finds it to be strange behaviour, so one day he asks him:
“Comrade, what are you doing? Can I help you?”
“Thank you comrade, but I’m only interested in the obituaries.”
“But comrade, the obituaries are at the back!”
“Not the ones I am looking for, comrade!”
It has acquired a certain acuity in today’s America where the leaders are a series of unpopular men approaching their eighties.
There is a widespread “Is He Dead Yet?” meme that’s the contemporary direct equivalent of the Soviet joke.
It's called the Swan Lake moment: Swan Lake on loop on the state media TV. That's what happens when everything is turmoil and nobody knows what will come next.
And a time when the Chairmanship was not a revolving door, though it became more of one immediately afterward.
Deleted Comment
Maybe wait until you have at least 1 anecdote, anywhere in the history of the world, of major creativity from reading an obituary, before recommending it?
Obits are mini bios, but better than living bios, and more accessible than bestselling bios that make you think you have to be Rockefeller or Lincoln
And I object in principle to telling silly stories about desirable activities to try to justify them. This is how we get bad ideas like 'Mozart for babies' or 'we should make kids play chess because it correlates with being smarter'. Chess should be played for its intrinsic value, because if it can only be justified by its instrumental value in raising IQ or grades, the case for that was weak, much weaker than its proponents were willing to admit, and has since turned out to be false - but along the way, wasted a lot of time and money and made a lot of kids miserable playing a game they didn't like, and the proponents just made the world a worse place by wasting all those resources, filling the literature with useless analyses and research on chess correlates, and decreasing public trust in science.
Dead Comment
One approach that I often do, is to go to fivebooks.com when an any random subject or topic strikes me and then try to read the books their interviewees have recommended on that topic. I have found many interesting books in this way.
Like their lists about the Spanish Civil war lead me to 'Forging of a Rebel' by Arturo Barea.
Another source is to look into famous/interesting peoples reading lists. Many famous people including Gandhi, Tolstoy and others kept lists of all books that they read.
The whole piece would be begging the question were there a question. It's a statement of faith.
It's like the saying about the Velvet Underground: 'very few people came to their concerts but everyone who did, started a band'.
Deleted Comment