As previously discussed, most Internet searches for family information should generally begin with death records. If you know the date of death, look first for an obituary. If you're not sure of at least the year of death, and your subject died after 1962, begin with the Social Security Death Index. The order doesn't really matter too much, as you should eventually end up scouring all relevant sources of death information, just to make sure you don't overlook anything important.

You have probably heard of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the famous Little House on the Prairie series. Since she's famous, you can find much more information about her online than you would for most people. Just ignore those biographies and other data for now, however, and search for her obituary using her name and year of death. Because it's free and indexes multiple newspaper databases, Google News Archive Search (http://news.google.com/archivesearch) is a good place to begin. A search for laura ingalls wilder 1957 turns up multiple articles on Mrs. Wilder, but since you're looking for her obituary, click on the date 1957 from the left-hand timeline to narrow the results to articles that appeared the year that she died. This turns up about a dozen results, including several obituary notices — one from the New York Times and several from newspapers published in NewspaperARCHIVE, both of which are available only to subscribers.

If you subscribe to either news service, or have access through your local library, you'll be able to read the full obituary that includes a photograph, and information on her life including her work as a writer and editor. It also includes some family facts such as the full married name of her daughter, along with the name of her husband (Almanzo J. Wilder) and the year of their marriage and his death. There are also a few brief mentions of places that she lived — she was born in Wisconsin; she and her husband lived in De Smet, South Dakota, when their daughter was born; they then moved to Florida, and later to the Ozarks. Assuming that you knew little about Mrs. Wilder, this gives you approximate time frames, locations, and names of other family members, which will allow you to search for her in the census and other records.

The obituary also mentioned that Laura Ingalls Wilder died on her family farm, and a quick Internet search can tell you that this was Rocky Ridge Farm, in the Ozarks of Missouri. The next obvious step would be to use this information to locate a death certificate. The Missouri State Archives (www.sos.mo.gov/archives) has death records online, but if you weren't aware of this you would search for such a database using the search techniques and resources discussed in this chapter. The death certificate for Laura Ingalls Wilder is included in this free online database, which presently covers the years 1910 to 1959. A digital image of the certificate is linked which tells us that she died on 10 February 1957 of “cerebral hemorrhage” and was buried in Mansfield Cemetery in Mansfield, Missouri. She is listed as an “author” and “widow,” the daughter of Charles Ingalls and Carolyn Quiner. The informant who provided this information was her daughter, Rose Lane from Danbury, Connecticut.

A search of the database also turns up the death certificate for her husband, listed as Almanso [sic] James Wilder. His certificate tells us that Almanzo was born 13 February 1857 in Malone, New York, to James Wilder and Angeline Day; was a retired farmer; and lived about a mile east of the town of Mansfield in Wright County, Missouri. He is also listed as having being buried in the Mansfield Cemetery in Mansfield on 28 October 1949.

There is a lot of vital information on each of these death certificates that can lead you to additional records and the next generation of both family trees. Because the death certificates list Mansfield Cemetery as the burial location for both Laura and Almanzo, the next step is to search online for information on Mansfield Cemetery. A Google search for “mansfield cemetery” missouri turns up a result from the Cemetery Project (www.thecemeteryproject.com). Clicking on this link leads to photos of the cemetery and the Wilder grave.

Granted, Laura and Almanzo are well-known and there is more information available online for them than for most people because the family tree has already been well-researched. Obituaries can be found online for millions of everyday people, however. The Missouri death certificate database where you found Almanzo's death certificate includes everyone who died in Missouri during those years, not just the famous folk. And cemetery transcriptions and other death records are also fairly easy to find online. Just follow these same basic steps with your own ancestors, and you may be surprised at just how much you can find!