Researching Recent Obituaries for All My ‘Mayflower’ Cousins

There is more than one way to find your relatives in GenealogyBank’s massive archive of Recent Obituaries.

I’ve noticed that genealogists often go to the Recent Obituaries collection when they are researching a specific relative that died in the past 40 years. They search, find them and go.

But wait—there’s more.

There is another valuable approach you can take with the Recent Obituaries that lets us find relatives even when we don’t know their names—and even if we have never heard of them before!

Obituaries are handy resources for genealogists. They speak about the person, their interests and what was important to them. Many obituaries mention that the deceased had a sense of family and history. I often see obituaries that say so and so loved genealogy, and then name the ancestors that fought in the Revolutionary War, or who had come to America on the Mayflower.

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Tracing Your Mayflower Ancestry

Having studied this for the past 50 years, I’ve concluded that nearly all Americans with ancestral roots prior to 1820 that lived in upper New England (Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and probably Rhode Island) have at least one ancestor that came over on the Mayflower.

I know I do.

I have seven Mayflower ancestors (including Thomas Rogers) and I want to track down and document all of the descendants of my Pilgrim ancestors.

The Recent Obituaries archive is a terrific way to do this.

Typically I will enter the name of a Mayflower passenger and the word “Mayflower” in the Include Keywords searchbox.

For example, here’s a search for “Thomas Rogers” and “Mayflower.”

screenshot of GenealogyBank's search box, showing a search for "Thomas Rogers" and "Mayflower"
This GenealogyBank search pulled up a lot of accurate search results, like this one for Mary-Jane Earle Hensley.

obituary for Mary-Jane Earle Hensley, Daily News Record newspaper article 3 October 2012
Daily News Record (Harrisonburg, Virginia), 3 October 2012

This is a great genealogical find.

According to this obituary, not only was Mary-Jane a descendant of Thomas Rogers—but “She published a book on Thomas Rogers, Mayflower Pilgrim, in 1980.”

By building on the information in her obituary I can use other newspaper articles, census and other records to chain backwards on the family tree to Thomas Rogers. This way I can extend and complete our family history and document each person as I go from person to person in the tree.

You can do this with other clues in an obituary.

Did the family come from a very small town?

Do you share a Revolutionary War ancestor or other famous relative?

Build on those clues and rely on GenealogyBank’s Recent Obituaries to accurately document your family tree. To learn more about how to use obituaries for genealogy research, watch our tutorial on YouTube: “Obituaries: Clues to Look For.”

Note: FamilySearch International (FamilySearch.org) and GenealogyBank yesterday announced an agreement to make over a billion records from historical obituaries searchable online. The tremendous undertaking will make a billion records from over 100 million U.S. newspaper obituaries readily searchable online. The newspapers are from all 50 states and cover the period 1730 to the present.  Find out more at: https://www.genealogybank.com/family-search/

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3 thoughts on “Researching Recent Obituaries for All My ‘Mayflower’ Cousins

  1. Oh My . . . Mother would be THRILLED to know she helped you in some way. Many thanks for giving me a smile. Best, Jan Hensley

  2. Jan – hi cousin – I am so touched that you read this and that it brought a smile to your face. Mom’s are special – it is good to see the extended families being linked and in touch. With the efforts of GenealogyBank to make finding news articles and obituaries as easy as the click of a mouse …. and the efforts by others to put up and link ‘everyone’ in massive online family trees – the world of genealogy has completely changed.

    So good to hear of you. Our best to you and the other members of the family.

    Tom

  3. I’d like to know if any of these family surnames have any connection to William Brewster, Myles Standish and William Bradford: Hart, Winterson, Collins, Sisler, MacGrath, Wagner, Evans, Coite, King, Nickerson, Abdondolo, Kearney and Donahue.

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