When someone close to you passes away, you will more than likely be informed immediately. However, how do you find out about the death of an old friend, or a distant relative? In this blog, I am going to cover the various ways you can go about this, and also demonstrate what a useful tool
funeral-notices.co.uk is when trying to do this.
The traditional way to find out about a passing of someone that you knew but weren’t close to was to check in the newspaper, and for some this is still the way they prefer. People all over the country buy local newspapers, sometimes with the sole intention of checking the death notices for people they may have known.
All notices which appear in our papers will also appear on the recently revamped
funeral-notices.co.uk, which contains a vast archive of death notices stretching back as far as 2002. Not only does this allow you to quickly and easily search for a notice – you can search by name, newspaper or both – but it also allows you to search notices which appeared in papers from across the UK, useful as people will often move out of the area in which they once lived.
More and more, people will announce passings over social media - particularly
Facebook, as people are often ‘Friends’ on the website with hundreds if not thousands of people they know. While they will often also put a more formal notice in the paper, this is an effective way to announce the death and make sure everyone that may want to know is aware of it.
If someone well-known – whether a national celebrity or in the local area – has passed away, newspapers and websites will often run an article highlighting the passing and going into detail about their life and accomplishments. These can be shared widely, both through word of mouth and online, and are often the way people will learn of the death.
Sometimes, finding out about a passing will be as simple as being told face-to-face by someone who has heard about the death and thinks you would be interested to know. If you’re particularly concerned about someone, you may speak to someone who’s close to them and ask them about their situation - unfortunately this is sometimes how people find out about the death of someone they knew.
As this blog has demonstrated, there are many different ways to find out about the death of someone that you knew. As stated earlier,
funeral-notices.co.uk has an archive of almost 5 million notices, so if there’s someone you’d like to know the status of, there’s no better place to start your search.
