Washington State Cemetery & Obituary Resources

 

Effective June 16, 2014 due to budget cuts and reduced staff, the Washington State Library is no longer offering an obituary lookup service.

 

We have compiled resources to help you locate death dates, obituary citations, and obituary research services in Washington State.

 

There are also many useful links on our Vital Records page.

 

Obituary Research Options

Washington State Obituary Indexes
Washington State Cemetery Records & Transcriptions 
Pacific Northwest Indexes & Transcriptions

 

 

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Obituary Research Options 

  1. Interlibrary Loan
    www.sos.wa.gov/library/libraries/interlibrary.aspx

    The Washington State Library lends out its microfilmed newspaper collection through interlibrary loan.  You can submit an interlibrary loan request at your local library.  When we receive that request, we will send the microfilm to your library for you to search.  Every box of microfilm is listed in our online catalog.

         If you have any questions about which newspapers cover the area you are researching, contact us through
         Ask-A-Librarian, and we’d be happy to help.

 

Washington State Obituary Indexes

If you are looking for recent obituaries, try searching the archives on the newspaper web site of the town where the person lived and/or died.

Use our email reference form to request a copy of an obituary from one of the communities served by the King County Library System (KCLS).

Provide complete information on the individual including full name, place of death, and date of death*. E.g., "Please send the obituary for John Doe, Seattle WA, date of death 5/15/2000."

If you have information on a publication that contains the obituary, please include that as well. E.g., "Please send the obituary for John Doe appearing in the Seattle Times, May 18, 2000, p.5."

General research is beyond the scope of our service. E.g., "Please send the obituary for Jane Doe, who died in Seattle WA in 2000" does not provide enough information for us to locate the obituary.

Submit one request per form and limit requests to one at a time. Do not send additional requests until you have received a response to your previous inquiry.

We provide this service for non-commercial purposes and reserve the right to discontinue or disregard requests from professional genealogists, paid researchers, or companies.

Staff will search the relevant publications in our collections for the King County community that is specified in the request. We are not able to search collections of other library systems.

* We will search for the date of death plus ten days.
Most requests are completed within 14 working days of the receipt of the request. 

 

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Washington State Cemetery Records & Transcriptions

 

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Pacific Northwest Indexes & Transcriptions

Check out the Pacific Northwest Vital Records Links on the Genealogy Web Resources page.