Maine Obituaries

Obituaries may provide information such as the age of the deceased, birth date and place, names of living relatives and their residences, maiden name, occupation, death date, cause of death, and place of burial. Deceased family members are frequently mentioned. Obituaries may also mention previous places of residence, immigration information, religion, and any social organizations or activities in which the deceased was involved.

Generally, the first step to obtaining an obituary is to find the death date of the person so that the obituary can be more easily found in a newspaper. Death dates may be obtained from the Statewide death index, or cemeteries in the local area where the person is believed to have died. Once a death date is known, the local library in the area may be contacted to learn whether or not they have newspapers for the time period needed, and if someone is willing to look for an obituary in that newspaper. If the newspapers are not held at the library, the local newspaper office may also be contacted to learn where older editions of the newspaper are kept. Some libraries and even newspaper publishers keep obituary files.

Online Resources

 * Maine State Library Obituary Search, index
 * Archives.com Obituaries for Maine ($)
 * — index and images
 * Newspaper Obituary collection for Maine: starts about 2003 to 2011 ($)
 * ProQuest Obituaries for Maine($)
 * Ancestry.com United States Obituary Collection for Maine ($)
 * Online Maine Death Indexes, Cemeteries and Obituaries, index
 * ObitsArchive Maine
 * Maine Obituaries


 * Maine Newspaper Project
 * Chronicling America
 * Community Newspapers digitized by Advantage Preservation
 * Google Historical Newspaper Archive
 * America's Historical Newspapers title list for text-searchable issues at GenealogyBank ($)(*)
 * Newspapers.com ($)
 * Newspaper Archive ($)
 * EBSCOhost, for American Antiquarian Society's "Historical Periodicals" collection Series 1-5
 * ProQuest Historical Newspapers (*)
 * Gale NewsVault (*)
 * Items appended with ($) are fee-based. Those ending with (*) are available at UMaine affiliate-libraries (incl. Univ. Southern Maine, in Portland).
 * See here for a list of electronic databases available through UMaine libraries.