Obituaries, Death Notices, and Necrology

Death is the final equalizer, but how the living interpret and respond to death and how it is presented publicly is social and cultural. Some form of public notification of individual death is common in all of the developed world and much of the underdeveloped world except in times of mass tragedies, such as war, famine, or natural disaster. The form of death notification depends largely on location in time and place of the deceased and on the social meaning of death in a particular culture and time.

There are different labels for the public notification of death; obituary, derived from the medieval Latin obitua-rius, “report of death,” is perhaps the most common. Obituaries and death and necrology notices are all a means of communicating to the public, usually to selected audiences, that one among us has died. Published obituaries or death notices typically include minimal vital statistics, and some provide more personal information that further identifies the deceased and describes what kind of person he or she was. Today in the United States, almost all deaths receive some publication closely approximating the actual statistics of death.

Progress toward the egalitarian obituary, however, is yet to be realized in most cultures. Mushira Eid commented that when she began researching obituaries in the Egyptian press in the 1930s she found “a society without women.” Until the late 20th century, not only in Egypt but also in the United States and many other countries, women were identified in their obituaries by their husbands or fathers, not for their own lives and often not even by their own names. Janice Hume noted the absence of women, children, African Americans, and of the poor and powerless in general from obituary pages in 19th-century America. Another example of how obituaries, or the lack thereof, reflect social status is the case of slaves whose deaths were noted only by family and by word of mouth.

Well past the time of slavery there was infrequent public notification of African American deaths, and many were buried in unmarked graves. If their passing was noted, it was because of their relationship with prestigious whites or because they were presented as role models for their race. For example, a “colored woman” was remembered in the Baltimore Sun in 1855 for “her loyalty to her mistress.” Historically, the changing status of African Americans in the United States can be gauged by their representation in mainstream media obituaries. The current use of obituaries to announce deaths for those of all stations in life is a result of accessibility and affordability of print and, more recently, electronic media and an underlying ideal about the worth of all people bolstered by the growth of the funeral industry.

Necrologies

Another means of notifying the public of selected deaths is that of a necrology. Before the printing press made daily publication and mass dissemination of information possible, it was customary for publications to periodically disseminate lists, a [Page 786]necrology, of people who had died in a given time frame. Many organizations or publications continue the practice of collecting and disseminating the names and perhaps a brief biography of people who died over the past year, since the last meeting or last publication. The necrology may be selective, as in well-known actors or public personalities, or limited to members of a particular group, such as a church or fraternal or professional organization. Less selective necrologies can simply include all people known to have died in the past year, by community or state. The practice of gathering and listing deaths of relevance to a particular audience is an old one, perhaps first practiced as early as 1731 by The Gentleman's Magazine of London. In 1869, the London Times' necrology for the year listed deaths in order of precedence: members of the House of Lords, followed by those of baronets, then those from the arts and sciences, the legal world, the professional army, and the House of Commons.

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