Summary
Obituary monitoring watches public obituary and memorial sources for names you care about. The important details are coverage, deduplication, match quality, and review workflow.
How obituary monitoring works
- You add a person with identifying details such as name, age, location, relationship, and known relatives.
- The system checks obituary and memorial sources over time.
- Possible matches are scored and shown with source evidence.
- You confirm or dismiss the match before the person is treated as deceased in your account.
What quality looks like
Quality is not just finding a name. A useful monitor must deduplicate repeated notices, handle aliases and maiden names, flag weak matches, and keep a review history so you know why a match was accepted or rejected.
Coverage expectations
Obituary coverage is uneven. Some families publish detailed notices; others publish nothing. That is why a responsible service should describe coverage limits clearly and avoid presenting a missing match as proof that someone is alive.
Sources
Related guides
Death Notification Service
What a death notification service can and cannot do, how monitoring works, and what evidence to expect before acting.
Coverage and Limitations
What IfTheyDie can monitor today, where coverage can miss deaths, and how to interpret confidence scores.
Obituary Search by Name
How to search for an obituary by name, narrow results by location and date, and avoid confusing people with similar names.
Want to stop checking manually?
Join the waitlist for IfTheyDie. We are building a monitoring service that watches public obituary and memorial sources and surfaces likely matches for review.
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