When I sat at Grammy Steeves’ side reading obituaries in the ’50s and ’60s, I thought they were kind of dull. No mention of the deceased’s favorite baseball team or the kind of rolls or pie that had the family salivating at Thanksgiving. You sort of had to know the person — or at least the family — to be interested in the scant details.
But as genealogists and family historians, we pore over every word of every obituary, looking for the smallest clue that may point us to the next possible source of information on our family trees.
Moreover, today’s descriptions of the person who died often touch us or inspire us or offer us the chance to chuckle. Today’s obituaries are longer, a function of the fact that the family pays for the writeup according to its length in many newspapers and so the interesting details don’t get edited out.
One obit I read recently didn’t just praise the woman who died for her great cooking, it shared one of her recipes. I thought that was wonderful. Talk about family history.
The piece I wrote when my dad passed away in 2002 mentioned hunting and fishing, of course, and his Navy service in World War II, but especially his faithful participation — in Navy uniform — in three parades every Memorial Day in Sangerville, Guilford and Abbot.
One of my favorite obit paragraphs that still has me laughing described the hobbies of Korean War veteran and Bangor ophthalmologist Dr. Gardner Moulton, who died in December. The paragraph concluded: “He visited all the continents except one. Having spent more than 70 winters in Maine, four winters on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, and one winter living in a tent on the top of a mountain in Korea, he figured he hadn’t missed anything by not visiting Antarctica!”
The dry humor of the total paragraph convinced me I knew who had written the obituary for Moulton, the son of Dr. Manning Moulton and the second of three generations of Bangor ophthalmologists.
“You wrote that,” I said to Dr. Paul Moulton on my next visit. “No,” he said, “he wrote it all himself. Every year or so, he’d take it out and revise it a little.”
So should we all. I’ve written a fair number of obits for people and with people, and I’ve written one for myself, but I confess it might take me more than a few minutes to find it. I don’t think my family has a copy, either. Therefore, I should dig it out today — because today is all we may have — or I should rewrite it.
I wrote up my dad’s obit about 10 days before he died. I didn’t know his life was that near its end, but he had been unwell for much of about two years, and if we didn’t need the obit in the near future, nothing lost. When he did die, I was relieved to at least have something for my mom and siblings to look at.
Writing one’s obit may strike some people as arrogant. I don’t see it that way. The last few hundred words describing one’s life, while not necessarily totally accurate, are a part of the historic record even as vital records and documents pertaining to school and work and other areas of our life.
There is no “have to” about writing an obituary, but I can tell you what I like to see in an obituary.
An example for a married woman would be this: Jane Anne (Brown) Doe died Jan. 1, 2024, in Bangor. If you want to insert a nickname, such as “Jennie,” use quotation marks because parentheses are best used for the maiden name.
I think it’s important to include birth information. Jane was born July 1, 1776, in Bangor, for example, the daughter of Samuel John and Margaret (White) Doe. Obviously the birth and death dates are not for a real person — I don’t want someone to read this column and think there is a real obituary that goes with it. There isn’t.
I highly recommend listing the parents in the obit, including the mother’s maiden name. In some cases, a person may have been born to a single parent. So our Jane would have been born to Margaret White.
We’ll finish the topic of obituaries next week.
For i nformation on researching family history in Maine, see Genealogy Resources under Family Ties at bangordailynews.com/browse/family-ties. Brief questions may be sent to familyti@bangordailynews.com.