Ancestry.com Library Edition is a great tool for researching your family history, but it isn’t the only resource out there. If you’ve mostly used Ancestry up until now, it may be time to begin searching some other databases that can help you add more branches to your family tree.
Obituaries are important sources of family history research because they contain information about a person’s life, such as birth and death dates, and they can often help you discover the names of relatives.
Finding Obituaries in The Jessamine Journal
If the family member you’re researching lived in Jessamine County, you may be able to find their obituary in The Jessamine Journal.
If the obituary appeared in that newspaper, our obituary index will tell you the date it was published.
You’ll find obituaries that appeared in the paper between 1887 and 2005 in the library’s microfilm collection. You can search obituaries published in The Jessamine Journal from 2005 to the present in the database America’s Obituaries and Death Notices.
Finding Obituaries in America’s Obituaries and Death Notices
America’s Obituaries and Death Notices is a library database from NewsBank that collects records from more than 3,600 newspapers nationwide, making them available through one fully searchable database.
The database’s records go back to 1860 in some of the larger newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune. However, most of the records available in smaller newspapers are much newer, from the 1980s and up.
America’s Obituaries and Death Notices provides full-text obituaries from The Jessamine Journal from 2005 to the present. The database provides full-text obituaries from the Lexington Herald-Leader from 1983 to the present.
If you are using the database from home, log in with your library card number. Find out how to search the database in the video below.