Fort Smith, Arkansas Obituary Archive Search | GenealogyBank (2024)

How to Search Fort Smith, Arkansas Obituary Archives

How do you begin searching through our vast Fort Smith obituary archives?

The easiest way to perform a basic Fort Smith obituary search is to enter the last name of your relative and press the “Search” button. You’ll gain access to thousands of Arkansas newspaper obituaries in seconds.

However, if you have a common last name or want to discover someone specific, you need to go deeper than this by using advanced search techniques. Follow these steps to begin narrowing down your results:

• Step One - Enter known first, middle, and last names of your relative to increase accuracy. This will ensure close match Fort Smith, Arkansas obituaries are more likely to pertain to the right person.
• Step Two - Add in keywords using the information you already know about your relative. For example, if you know which town or neighborhood they resided in, include these keywords. Alternatively, try looking into US Census Records.
• Step Three - Likewise, you can exclude certain keywords to filter out irrelevant results. Maybe you know they didn’t live in a specific town or go to a specific school? Include these keywords as exclusions.
• Step Four - Even if you don’t know the year they died, you can include a year range. Our search feature will include all results relevant to a specific period, check out marriage records and birth records to hone in your research.
• Step Five - Change the sorting options to find different obituaries. You can order results by newest, oldest, and best match.

Tips for a Successful Fort Smith Obituary Search

Accurate record keeping has always been a major problem for modern family historians. When tracking down your ancestors, you need to be aware that mistakes were common. Many records were taken orally and so may have been noted down incorrectly.

Older Fort Smith, Arkansas local newspaper obituaries typically contained valuable pieces of family history. These snippets of information can confirm whether an ancestor belonged to your family and may also serve as foundations for additional research into your extended family.

When searching Fort Smith obits, here are our top tips for uncovering your family history:

• Work backward. Use more recent known ancestors to uncover older ones.
• Search for ancestors by their initials. Older obituaries may not have listed your ancestor’s full name.
• When looking for a female relative, search by their husband’s name.
• Search by common misspellings. Information may not have been noted down correctly.
• When looking through the Fort Smith obituary archives, double-check information by using any official government records you have.

These research strategies can help you dig deeper and overcome those frustrating dead ends. Using these search techniques can also help you fact-check your findings to ensure you have the right person.

How to Find Death Notices in Fort Smith

Death notices in Fort Smith are another source of valuable information for discovering those elusive ancestors. There is a difference between death notices and obituaries, however. Even though some people use the term interchangeably, they are two different things.

Obituaries are newspaper ads taken out by the family. They describe the person, their life, and who they are. Death notices are formalized reports that someone has died.

Death notices were often used to tell family, friends, and extended family members about a person’s death and where the funeral service will be held. They are especially useful if you want to find out where one of your ancestors was buried.

Fort Smith obituaries, on the other hand, are dictated entirely by the family. Inaccuracies and exaggerations were always common, so take the information detailed in them with a pinch of salt.

If you want to look up death notices alongside Fort Smith local newspaper obituaries, here are some tips on how to do it:

• Utilize advanced search techniques, such as proximity search and Boolean operators.
• Factcheck found records by searching through multiple collections on GenealogyBank.
• Use any relatives mentioned in death notices to fact-check and uncover other sections of your family tree.

Fort Smith obituary archives and death notices are invaluable sources of genealogical information. If you’re ready to trace your story with GenealogyBank, perform your first search now.

Other Useful Collections To Try

• US Newspapers Archives
  • Birth Records
  • Marriage Records
  • Passenger Lists
• Government Publications
• Social Security Death Index
• US Cultural Archives
• African-American
• Hispanic Ancestry
• Irish Genealogy Records
• Native American Ancestry
• German-American
• Italian Genealogy
• Jewish-American

For more information on discovering who you are and where you came from, download our free guide, “Tips for Searching Newspapers.”