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Research & Resources

Obituary Searches

Library staff members are always happy to assist you with research in-person at the 3rd floor Reference desk in the Main Library.

An obituary search is very time consuming. It can take over four hours for one search. This is because:

  • Obituaries can be published as late as two weeks after a death, often requiring a painstaking search through weeks of newspapers.
  • About 10% of the deaths that occur in Tucson do not show up in the newspaper.
  • The indexing of obituaries is poor.

An obituary is not a public record. Deaths are not required to be published in a newspaper.

How to start your search

Find the date of death first.

Do you know the death date? If so, you may bring the date(s) to Main Library's 3rd floor Reference desk to search through Tucson newspapers on microfilm. The more exact the date, the better. "Sometime in September, 1965" will involve a whole lot more microfilm browsing than "September 28, 1965."

If you do not know the death date, you may find an exact or approximate date of the obituary in question by using one or more of the following resources:

About these resources

NewsBank Newspaper Database
Use NewsBank to access the Arizona Daily Star from 1991 to present to search for obituaries and death notices. You must have a valid library card.
Obituary Daily Times
Compiled by volunteers, the ODT is a daily index of published obituaries across the world. It will provide the obituary date and name of publication it appeared in, but not the actual obituary.
The limitations of this resource are:
  • The site is free to use but its primitive search engine means location searches are problematic.
  • Soundex and MetaPhone searches will cast a wider net, as they use "sound alike" algorithms to find alternate spellings of names.
  • PCPL only has obituaries from historic Tucson newspapers. Should you be looking for obituaries from other cities, you may use ODT to locate the date and place but most likely you will be unable to get the actual obituary from PCPL.
  • For older obituaries (1940's, 1950's, etc.) ODT is somewhat limited, but is definitely improving.
Social Security Death Index
This resource gives only the date and location of a person's death. It does not give the obituary date. SSDI information is derived from records of deceased persons who possessed Social Security numbers and whose deaths have been reported to the Social Security Administration.
The limitations of this resource are:
  • Since SSDI does not give an obituary date, you still have to search through newspapers for the actual obituary, up to a couple weeks after the death date.
  • This database does not include all of the deaths in the United States, just the deaths that the Social Security Administration were informed about. Usually the Social Security Administration is informed when someone collecting Social Security dies. Some older U.S. citizens may never have received Social Security, such as retired military members, ex-federal government employees, or members of some unions. These people will not be in this database.
Arizona Birth and Death Indexes
This site lets you search for microfilmed images of county or state issued birth and death certificates. The microfilmed documents on this website are copies from the Official Archives of the State.
Arizona Daily Star Index
The indexes for deaths in 1953, 55-65, 70-89 are available at the 3rd floor Reference desk at the Main Library. Please come to the library to search these indexes.
Arizona Death Records
The Arizona Death Records (929.3791 AR47a) is a catalog of tombstones in the state. There are two volumes, plus a supplement covering the time period up to 1982. The catalog lists names along with birth and death dates as they appear on the tombstone. This catalog is located in the Cele Peterson Arizona Collection at the Joel D. Valdez Main Library.
Books
Prominent Arizonans are included in an number of books in the Arizona Collection, including Arizona Biographical Dictionary, Arizona’s Men of Achievement, Arizona Women’s Hall of Fame and Who’s Who in Arizona.

Arizona Biographical Database

This biographical database refers to persons in the Arizona State Library's collection of books, newspaper articles, periodicals, obituaries, vertical files, school yearbooks, etc. Though this database only mentions the person's name and what materials the person is mentioned in, you can usually find what part of Arizona the person is from and when they lived.

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