Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum Here. You or someone you know may still
Speaker 1: subscribe to a local newspaper, to a print edition, even
Speaker 1: depending on a number of factors such as your age
Speaker 1: and health and whether or not your beetlejuice. You might
Speaker 1: turn immediately to the obituaries section, curious if there's anyone
Speaker 1: you recognize among the faces and names of the recently deceased.
Speaker 1: If so, you are certainly not alone. For more than
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty years, newspapers have published obituaries to
Speaker 1: announce the deaths of both the famous and familiar. Obituaries
Speaker 1: fulfill a unique role in local communities and broader society,
Speaker 1: both notifying the public of a passing and inviting them
Speaker 1: to join the collective mourning process. As print newspaper circulation
Speaker 1: has declined sharply over the past twenty five years, as
Speaker 1: so have print obituaries, but the familiar format of the
Speaker 1: obituary remains even as death notices move online to websites
Speaker 1: or heartfelt posts on social media. Just for one example,
Speaker 1: ancestry dot com, the genealogy website, about five years ago
Speaker 1: upgraded its online obituary archives to include more than two
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty two million published obituaries dating back to
Speaker 1: the seventeen fifties. They used algorithms to extract biographical data
Speaker 1: from centuries of print obituaries, birth and death dates, geographical locations, parents' names,
Speaker 1: and next of kin in order to automatically populate the
Speaker 1: family trees of subscribers to their service. But the practice
Speaker 1: of death notices goes way further back. The first obituaries
Speaker 1: were published in ancient Rome around fifty nine BCE on
Speaker 1: papyrus newspapers called daily events, but these notices of death
Speaker 1: didn't become prevalent until much later. In newspapers. From before
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds, ancestry dot com spots could only find
Speaker 1: a handful of obituaries per year. A few years later,
Speaker 1: the number broke a hundred for the first time. Papers
Speaker 1: did regularly publish stories about the deaths of well known
Speaker 1: public figures like politicians, wealthy socialites, artists, and other newsmakers,
Speaker 1: but those stories written by journalists were distinct from these
Speaker 1: shorter death announcements that evolved into the modern obituary. By
Speaker 1: the mid eighteen hundreds, newspapers were regularly publishing death notices
Speaker 1: submitted by local funeral homes. Before the linotype machine was
Speaker 1: invented in eighteen eighty six, every printed letter of every
Speaker 1: word printed in the newspaper had to be set by hand,
Speaker 1: so papers tended to be short, and obituaries were briefed,
Speaker 1: typically around fifty words long, just enough to give the
Speaker 1: name of the deceased, the name of a principal surviving
Speaker 1: family member, and the date and location of the funeral. Sadly,
Speaker 1: infants and young children died in large numbers in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century from illnesses and diseases that we now have
Speaker 1: vaccines for. Unlike adult obituaries, which stuck to the facts,
Speaker 1: a child's obituary may have included a brief bit of poetry.
Speaker 1: For example, this verse from an eighteen fifty one notice
Speaker 1: in the Philadelphia Public Ledger about the death of an infant,
Speaker 1: Dear Richard's gone to realms above to receive his savior's
Speaker 1: dying love. By the height of the Civil War, published
Speaker 1: death notices increased to tens of thousands a year. As
Speaker 1: more space and attention were given to obituaries, they began
Speaker 1: to serve as places for public expressions of mourning. For example,
Speaker 1: in the February seventh, eighteen sixty five edition of the
Speaker 1: Baltimore Sun, one death notice included a brief eulogy to
Speaker 1: a promising young man's life cut short at twenty one years.
Speaker 1: The subject of this notice was married, but six weeks
Speaker 1: ago he had just embarked in business and possessed the
Speaker 1: health and vigor to render it profitable. When the strong
Speaker 1: hand of affliction was laid upon him and the form
Speaker 1: recently so manly was soon prostrate in death. A further
Speaker 1: article this episode is based on how Stuffwork. Spoke with
Speaker 1: Genevieve Keiney, a president of the National Museum of Funeral
Speaker 1: History in Houston, Texas. She explained the death notices published
Speaker 1: in local newspapers also functioned as quasi legal documents because
Speaker 1: the newspaper was a public forum. A death announcement served
Speaker 1: to notify creditors who might want to file a claim
Speaker 1: against the deceased's estate. With the automation of typesetting, newspapers
Speaker 1: expanded at the turn of the twentieth century, and more
Speaker 1: space could be dedicated to death notices and obituaries. Like
Speaker 1: classified advertisements, newspapers charged a fee to publish obituaries, and
Speaker 1: publishers quickly realized there was good money to be made
Speaker 1: from them. Ancestry dot COM's obituary extractor found an increase
Speaker 1: in obituaries from nineteen hundred to the nineteen thirties of
Speaker 1: about three hundred percent. It was around this time, in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties and forties, that the modern obituary template
Speaker 1: took shape. Here's where we start to see families in
Speaker 1: funeral homes writing death notices that adhere to a familiar
Speaker 1: four part structure, a death announcement, short bio survived by
Speaker 1: section and funeral information. If you look at the obituary
Speaker 1: section of the Richmond Times Dispatch for July third of
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty eight, for example, it's a mix of shorter
Speaker 1: death notices written by families and longer obituaries written by
Speaker 1: staff journalists and wire services like the Associated Press. The
Speaker 1: shorter death notices had the deceased person's name of the headline,
Speaker 1: while a longer obituary written by the paper might carry
Speaker 1: the headline Missus Susan Murdock dies, writes Monday. Some of
Speaker 1: the obituaries had pictures that deceased in their youth, a
Speaker 1: regular feature of today's obits, one from nineteen thirty eight,
Speaker 1: even written after the funeral and shares an account of
Speaker 1: the service. That standard template can be a tremendous resource
Speaker 1: for experienced genealogists and folks just starting out researching their
Speaker 1: family history, as most standard obituaries include the spouse's name,
Speaker 1: children's names, including married names for adult daughters, grandchildren's names,
Speaker 1: and more. The style remained fairly unchanged throughout the second
Speaker 1: half of the nineteen hundreds, but things took a shift
Speaker 1: after the attacks on September eleventh of two thousand and one.
Speaker 1: Obituary expert Susan Sopper explained to NPR in twenty eighteen
Speaker 1: that in the months following the attacks, the New York
Speaker 1: Times published short narrative obituaries on each of the nearly
Speaker 1: three thousand people killed that day. She said they were fabulous.
Speaker 1: Everyone was recognized as a whole person, and they had
Speaker 1: fun anecdotes. They made you cry, they made you smile,
Speaker 1: And to me, that was sort of when the tide
Speaker 1: turned in abituary and people realized that you could bring
Speaker 1: a person to life and keep them alive in even
Speaker 1: a short written bio. Soaper theorized that these obituaries started
Speaker 1: a trend toward more honesty and openness and remembrances instead
Speaker 1: of using coded language like he died at home or
Speaker 1: she died suddenly. Families were opening up about how things
Speaker 1: like addiction or clinical depression took a loved one's life
Speaker 1: and including previously taboo details such as queer partners and
Speaker 1: children born out of wetlock. Families now use the space
Speaker 1: to talk about the passions and dreams of the deceased,
Speaker 1: and a few obituaries even go so far as to
Speaker 1: say that the deceased will not be missed. Today's episode
Speaker 1: is based on the article how obituaries went from dry
Speaker 1: death notices to tributes to truth on how stuffworks dot com,
Speaker 1: written by Dave Ruse. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio
Speaker 1: in partnership with how stuffworks dot com and was produced
Speaker 1: by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
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