Obituaries are my favorite news source
Hi friend,
I check the local funeral home website at least once a week.
Around rural Iowa, funeral announcements are posted on little white cards at grocery stores and gas stations. But since I use self checkout and pay-at-pump, I sometimes miss the notices. It’s helpful that the funeral home (I suppose some of you call it a mortuary?) keeps an up-to-date list of obituaries on their website.
Sometimes, I know the person in the newest obituary; in those cases, I go to the visitation. But usually, I read the obituaries as though I’m training for the hardest trivia contest you’ll ever enter.
Contrary to the impression I may have given you, I don’t actually know everyone here. I didn’t live here for twenty-five years. I grew up here from birth to eighteen (except that fever-dream year in Ukraine), and I met a lot of people, but I was too self-absorbed (or book-absorbed) to pay attention to the cast of characters around me.
if you missed my post about living in Ukraine in 1993, you can catch up here:
My lack of local memory is problematic when I run into someone who knows me, since I often don’t remember them. Or, maybe they don’t know me for sure, but they’ve pieced together who I am because my face looks like my family’s face. Or they ask me if I have diabetes yet, and I realize that they’ve asked a bizarrely personal question because we’re distant cousins who share the diabetic branch of our family tree.
In these encounters, I feel like an undercover detective. I’m deeply embedded in a unique gang and trying to gather enough details to take back to headquarters for later analysis without getting caught. I ask generic questions, like, “How’s your family?” hoping for some bit of intel without revealing that I don’t know their situation (this gambit blows up in my face if they say they’re obviously estranged from everyone, or that everyone is dead). I offer up details that might encourage them to respond accordingly, like saying what year I graduated high school. I try to note distinguishing physical characteristics — which can be hard when “old and white” describes 60% of the population and “young and white” describes another 38%.
Then I take this info back to my family at our next dinner, and we dive into detective work as fun and compelling as any true-crime podcast.
Privacy, online and in person, is such a concern in the modern world. My old tech company had extensive privacy controls to prevent misuse of personal information. Medical providers have HIPAA. Lawyers have attorney-client privilege. Most social networks allow anonymous accounts. The EU instituted the “right to be forgotten” to allow removal of certain personal information from the internet.
The idea of having the right to be forgotten here is laughable.
When I was growing up, I spent most holiday meals and Sunday dinners at the round oak table in my grandparents’ dining room. It was inevitable that an argument would erupt over some historical fact, either global or local.
For global facts, we turned to my granddad’s full set of 1976 World Book encyclopedias, which lived on a bookshelf in the dining room for these Sunday squabbles. They had cream and brown bindings, lush color photographs, and seemingly every fact you could ever want to know. I may not remember any names of people I met back then, but I remember the World Book’s transparent pages of the human body with layers for blood, bones, and musculature — and to be honest I don’t really regret that tradeoff in my neural pathways.
For local facts, we’d pull out phone books and plat books (printed maps of land ownership throughout the county, which were like the Bible here) and scour them for names. If we got desperate, we resorted to a gameshow-style “phone a friend” — calling a neighbor or cousin, even on Christmas Eve, to see if they could settle a dispute over the name of someone’s second husband or forgotten step-sibling.
Our investigatory tools are more sophisticated now.
Last week, I met someone and realized, with dawning horror, that I should have known who she was. She had married a man from Missouri and moved there, which is why I didn’t recognize her last name. But she knew too much about my family. It became clear that she was related to many (many) people here. I thought back through our conversation and hoped I hadn’t said anything I shouldn’t have said — and I think I’m in the clear, but you never know.
When I saw my parents later, I laid out the facts I’d gathered: a high school graduation year, an involvement in cheerleading, a child’s name, a dead mother.
This investigation was easy — the woman had told me her current name, unlike many of the people I run into who never introduce themselves. But there were nuances involving multiple marriages and name changes across several generations, which we of course had to get to the bottom of.
The first stop in any investigation is the funeral home website and their stockpile of obituaries. Family obits are an excellent source for biographical basics, like names of siblings, parents, kids. But if you get really skilled with reading the obit tea leaves, you know to seek out several family obits over time. As last names or acknowledged partners change in obit mentions, you can sometimes suss out divorces and remarriages, or family feuds and “special friends.”
Sometimes, we do a deeper search into local property records, which are now online instead of in plat books — seeing who lives next to whom, whether a property is owned by a person’s parents (#nepotism), etc. Other searches delve into Facebook — mostly for profile photos as proof of identity at the end of a search, when my family guesses who I met and we look up their photo to verify.
It’s no wonder I’m working on a fantasy novel set here, by the way. In our wanderings through other people’s family trees, my dad will sometimes say things like, “Oh, right, that makes her the Mad Russian’s daughter.” He always says it casually, as though it’s normal to a) remember hundreds of familial relationships outside our own lineage, and b) have nicknames like the Mad Russian. He could just as easily be introducing the Merovingian from the Matrix sequels or the Suriel from ACOTAR (iykyk) — fantastical characters from different worlds, with names that stick in our memories even if their origins are a mystery.
It feels like solving a grand puzzle when I give my parents two or three clues and they correctly guess who I met. I’ve only stumped them a couple of times. I know other families here play a similar game, since my parents sometimes get calls asking if they remember so-and-so. Their depth of local knowledge is encyclopedic, even as fewer local connections remain.
I wish my granddad could have experienced the internet as it is now — he probably would have fallen full tilt into a vast network of conspiracy theories, but he would have loved having access to so much information. I’m tempted to put a set of World Book encyclopedias in my dining room in his honor — you can pick up a set for a couple of dollars at an estate sale, if you don’t mind a bit of mildew with your outdated world events. But what I really want is a confetti cannon — something to set off in celebration during Sunday dinner, when we figure out yet another twisting branch of someone else’s family tree.
Maybe if I stay here another forty years, I’ll know as much as my parents do about others’ lineages. But if I stay that long, mine may be the only lineage left.
Cheers,
Sara
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