Publication FAQ’s

Frequently Asked Questions About Our Online Obituary Service

1) Why do you publish this blog? To “tag” (or link) the name of someone who died (along with their obituary) with the funeral home that is handling the funeral or memorial service arrangements in one central location. The many rich RSS feed features of WordPress.com allows us to accomplish this quickly and easily.

2) How much does it cost to publish an obituary, death notice, memorial service notification, or unveiling notice on the FuneralSearch.com obituary blog? Nothing. This is a FREE feature that is available to FuneralSearch.com network subscribers only.

3) Is there a word limit for obituaries? No. We do caution you, however, that the more information that is included in an obituary, the more sensitive biographical data will be available to identity thieves. In an age where data is swiftly published and shared among many networks, this should concern you.

4) Can anyone publish an obituary on the FuneralSearch.com obituary blog? No. Only licensed funeral directors who are part of our network. Please visit the advertising page of FuneralSearch.com for subscription information.

5) Can I include a photo with an obituary? No. Photos are a wonderful way to personalize an obituary but we do not publish them. We have two reasons for this: 1) Photos consume resources (storage space) that our blog doesn’t have and 2) Most photos require either cropping, resizing, or color correction before they can be published. These tasks involve special software and labor. As this is a FREE blog, software and labor fees are not part of our budget.

6) How long do obituaries remain on your blog? 30 days. After this time has elapsed, the obituary is removed from our blog. Removal from our blog does NOT mean that the obituary is completely removed from all indexes on the Internet.

7) I’m a funeral director and I publish obituaries on my own site. Why would I want to publish an obituary on your blog? First, congratulations on not only publishing a web site, but having a site with obituaries! You’re way ahead of most other funeral homes in the United States. Here’s the reason why you should publish an obituary on our blog: We’re attempting to create ONE CENTRAL LOCATION for obituaries so Internet users don’t have to bounce from site to site to find the information they’re looking for. If you share this vision, we welcome you and your firm here.

8) What does FuneralSearch.com do? FuneralSearch.com provides directions to funeral homes throughout the United States. In a recent poll we conducted on our web site, we learned that of the 3,388 people who responded, 88% of our readers were simply looking for directions when they went online to find a funeral home. If you search for “funeral home directions” using Google, you’ll find us in the Top 10.

9) Why can’t people post condolence messages on the obituary blog? There are two reasons why we’ve disabled the “comments” feature on our blog. First, comments must be monitored. If we didn’t monitor the comments someone could post something that is inappropriate or downright nasty. Second — and this is a personal reason that most funeral directors will understand — I feel that allowing people to post their sentiments, however sincere, is diminishing the funeral experience and grief cycle. For decades people would buy a card from their local Hallmark store, they’d write a few lines expressing their feelings, and they’d mail the card to the family. Today we send e-mails, electronic cards, and post messages on blogs or web sites and we think we’ve done the right thing. A card that’s delivered by the US Postal Service helps people much more than an e-mail ever could.

10) How do I publish an obituary on the FuneralSearch.com obituary blog? If you’re a FuneralSearch.com network member, simply e-mail the obituary to us at FuneralSearch@aol.com and we’ll publish the notice within 4-6 hours.

11) Can I fax an obituary to you? No. We only accept e-mail obituaries. E-mail allows us to COPY the obituary and PASTE IT into a blog post. What you send us will appear EXACTLY on our blog. This policy allows us to access our e-mail and the blog from anywhere in the country, at any time, whereas a fax would require us to physically have access to a fax machine in one office.

12) How do I make corrections to an obituary? Resubmit the ENTIRE obituary to us with the proper corrections and we’ll cut and paste as described in question # 11.

13) Do you proofread obituaries? We do perform a quick spell check but our dictionary will only detect and correct basic misspelled words. For the most part, what you send us is EXACTLY what readers will see.

14) How do I remove an obituary? Send e-mail to FuneralSearch@aol.com with instructions to remove the obituary. Within a couple of hours, the obituary will be removed from our blog but it may NOT BE removed from the RSS feed network if indexing has taken place.

IMPORTANT NOTICE ABOUT OBITUARIES!

Online obituaries are a fast, effective, and tasteful way to communicate time-sensitive funeral or memorial service information to literally millions of people in a matter of hours.

However, we do caution you that ALL obituaries (not just online versions) can be potentially dangerous. Keep in mind that most newspapers in America now offer both a print and a online version of their publications. Most newspapers use the same RSS feed network as our blog.

Identity thieves troll print and online obituaries and they adore online memorial web sites that publish photos, videos, and extensive biographical data and family trees.

With this in mind, we STRONGLY RECOMMEND publishing an obituary that addresses the very basics, namely, who, when, and where. Please read our Identity Theft and the Dead page. A link to this page can be found to the right.