Minnesota Obituary Archive Search | GenealogyBank (2024)

Online obituaries can be a powerful tool for getting closer to history and discovering your ancestral roots from decades past. Minnesota obituaries are a great starting point for anyone having difficulty researching their relatives via family records and accessing accurate information from professional genealogy researchers.

Obituaries feature in both local and state newspapers, providing a wider scope for regional genealogy research in Minnesota - making it easier to uncover the stories of departed relatives. However, the manual process of sifting through newspaper archives is slow-paced and takes a lot of hard work to finish. The GenealogyBank online database makes it possible to search these records by surname or other family information, helping you unlock your story faster and much more easily.

Reasons to search local Minnesota newspaper obituaries include:

• Discovering branches of your family tree
• Uncovering surviving members of your extended family
• Learning about long-lost family members
• Exploring your ancestry, with access to over 13,000 newspapers spanning 330 years of U.S. history in seconds through a simple search. Our records, 95% of which are exclusive to GenealogyBank, can help you build a stronger connection to your roots

How to Perform a Minnesota Obituary Search:

You can begin by inputting your relative's last name in the "Search" field for an initial set of results.

For more in-depth research, perform an advanced search:

• Give the complete name of the relative in question
• Make use of crucial keywords, like for instance a hometown or school
• Exclude keywords to narrow down locations - e.g. a known birthplace or residence
• Specify a year range to refine your results.
• Sort results by oldest, newest, or best matches

Tips for Searching Minnesota Obituary Archives:

• Use any details about your relatives that you already know and cross-reference them against your search results to verify identities
• Try searching obituaries by initials, not just first names, as many older records only used initials
• Include any husband's names when searching for women, as these were often included in records pre-1900
• Narrow your searches using certain names and specific date ranges that account for misspellings and mishearing - e.g. ‘Thompson’ may also be written as ‘Thomson’ or ‘Tompson’

Other Useful Collections to Explore:

• US Newspapers Archives
• Birth, Marriage, and Passenger Records
• Government Publications
• Social Security Death Index
• US Cultural Archives, including specific ancestries like African-American, Hispanic, Irish, Native American, German-American, Italian, and Jewish-American