Obituaries often contain information helpful to genealogy research. Unfortunately they’re subject to copyright so you can’t legally transcribe nor share them unless they are in the public domain. The next best alternative to transcribing them is to abstract them.
A genealogical abstract is a summary of the pertinent details from the source. While some of them are entertaining and well written, your primary interest as a genealogist is in extracting the evidence from the obituary so that you can analyze it with other evidence and reach sound conclusions. Abstracts help you do that and you can share your abstracts without concern over copyright infringement.
I have a system for abstracting obituaries that I’m going to share with you. It consists of a method and a simple template. In the following series of videos I introduce you to the method and template then walk you through abstracting obituaries from different periods to demonstrate the use of the parts of the template and cement the five step process. Two of the obituaries I abstract in the demonstration are from 1851 and 1875 so a transcription would be more appropriate because the material is excluded from copyright protection. I suggest using the method and template a few times after watching the videos to really get it down.
If you’re seeing this your browser does not support the video tag. Please upgrade your browser to the latest version.
If you’re seeing this your browser does not support the video tag. Please upgrade your browser to the latest version.
If you’re seeing this your browser does not support the video tag. Please upgrade your browser to the latest version.
Here’s the text I have in the template. Copy it and paste it into a plain text file using an editor like Notepad or TextEdit.
Process:
1. As you read the obituary from beginning to end, fill in the boilerplate
2. Remove unused boilerplate and placeholders
3. Edit for flow
4. Verify accuracy of abstractions
5. Copy and paste the abstract into your genealogy database and cite the source
of the obituary
Thanks, Ben. Great idea and really appreciate the template. However, I’m groaning as I realize how many obituaries I’m going to have to abstract! I always thought that, if I cite the newspaper info, it would be okay to use the full obit. Learn something new every day!
I know this post is pretty old, but the information is pretty useful! Thank you for the tip.Father and husband. Family historian. Creator of GenealogyTools.com and PracticalCitation.com. Author of Practical Citation. Founder of Mint Yogi LLC. [Read More …]
All trademarks remain property of their respective holders, and are used only to directly describe the products being reviewed and or demonstrated. Their use in no way indicates any relationship between Mint Yogi LLC and the holders of said trademarks.