GoKawiilThe following is a guest post by Elizabeth Davidson, a Reference Librarian in the Serial and Government Publications Division.
Obituaries as we know them today are rich records of a person’s life. They might include the full name of the deceased, their predeceased and surviving family members, details of their accomplishments, or information about their funerary service or interment. What may come as a surprise to many is that this information-rich article is a very recent evolution in the long history of information sharing about a person’s death.
The earliest form of the obituary is the death notice, a short announcement of someone’s passing rather than a description and celebration of their life, and its history can be tracked as far back as the 59 BC Roman daily gazette, the “Acta Diurna,” where the deaths (among other official events of the day) of prominent citizens and politicians would be hand carved on metal or stone and publicly posted for review. Over a millennium later, the invention of the Gutenberg Press made it both easier and more common to share death notices in printed newspapers, but by the time colonial American newspapers were being printed the privilege was still reserved for notable individuals – those with wealth, fame, or of local or political importance at their time of death.
Even members of the public who were once famous but had faded from the public eye by the time of their deaths were unlikely to merit more than a line in the paper, if there was any mention at all! Gouverneur Morris, one of America’s Founding Fathers and known today as the author of the Preamble of the Constitution, warranted only a single line of acknowledgement in the New Hampshire Gazette after his death in a list of those who had passed away in the previous week: “[Died:] In Morrisania, N.Y. the Hon. Gouverneur Morris, aged 65.”
Meanwhile, the death of Stephen Heard, a president of the state of Georgia (the position that we now know as ‘governor’), lifelong friend of George Washington, a Revolutionary War soldier, and the namesake of Heard County, Georgia, was recorded only in family records without any known obituaries or death notices published after his passing or interment when he died of old age.
Death notices for local ‘curiosities’ were sometimes recorded, whether it was the passing of the oldest citizen in the area or a death under a strange circumstance. These events were considered ‘news’ because they were of interest to the newspaper’s readers and the local citizenry at large.
In the world we live in today where much of our news, both personal and public, is conveyed in text, it’s hard to conceptualize that most deaths weren’t recorded publicly. But in a time when people lived their lives centered around the gathering points related to their houses of worship, businesses and families, the deaths of members of the community were communicated via word of mouth. Deaths were recorded in mortality schedules, family records or family Bibles, church or temple records, or probate and will records rather than in local or state newspapers.
Newspapers charged a fee to print a death notice or obituary if the paper had not elected to publish the death as a newsworthy event, compounding the weight of publication for families who might need to conserve their savings. This increased the imbalance of the type of individuals whose deaths we see reflected in historic newspapers. Death notices of men were more likely to be published than of women, white citizen’s deaths were more likely to be published than of any other group, and the wealthy were able to afford to pay to have their death notice or obituary published if a newspaper was not already planning to print it, strongly slanting the obituaries and death notices of this time toward specific groups of people.
Almost all obituaries published before the 1880s were short in length due to the necessity of setting type in the Gutenberg press by hand; the obituaries of infants and children might have included poetry or verse, while the obituaries of adults often celebrated their moral and social values.
Exceptions to the classism in 18th and early 19th century American death notices can be found in events of mass casualties such as shipwrecks, where lists of the dead were published without consideration to individual wealth or personal importance. Not only were disasters a source of public interest and therefore ‘newsworthy,’ there was no other central community source of information to inform friends and family of the loss of their loved ones.
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