How to Fact Check an Obituary Before It Runs

An obituary is one of the few pieces of writing about a person that outlives everyone who checked it. Long after the family has moved through the sharpest edge of grief, that same paragraph sits in a newspaper archive, on a funeral home website, and in a folder of clippings someone kept in a drawer. A misspelled name or a wrong date does not just sting for a week. It becomes the record.

Corrections are slow, and they are public. A correction notice draws more attention to the mistake than the original error ever did, and by the time it runs, the obituary has already been read by everyone it was written for. That is the case for one last careful pass before you submit, not because the draft is bad, but because even a beautifully written obituary can carry an error nobody caught.

This guide is not another writing tutorial. If you still need to draft the obituary itself, our step by step guide to writing an obituary walks through structure, tone, and templates. What follows assumes you already have a draft in hand, and it covers only the verification pass: how to check every fact against a real source before it goes out. Gather your documents in one place first, and the whole check takes about an hour.

Which Facts Go Wrong Most Often in Obituaries

The errors families notice after publication tend to be the same handful of avoidable mistakes every time: misspelled names, wrong middle initials, incorrect maiden names, a survivors list that is missing someone or lists them out of order, and service details that changed after the draft was written. These are not typos in the sense of a stray letter. They are facts that looked right to the person who wrote them.

Each one slips through for the same reason. The writer already knows the answer, so their eye reads what it expects to see rather than what is actually on the page. A daughter who has spelled her mother's maiden name in conversation her whole life will read it correctly even when it is printed wrong, because her mind fills in the version she already knows.

Facts that arrive secondhand carry the highest risk of all. A detail passed from a sibling to a spouse to whoever is typing the draft has usually been repeated two or three times before it reaches the page, and each retelling is a chance for a date or a name to shift slightly. If you have not already gathered the full set of names, dates, and details you need, our checklist of what to include in an obituary lists every fact that now needs a source before you can consider the draft finished.

No single reporter is credited with the line, but it has guided newsrooms for generations, and it applies just as well to an obituary. The closer the source, the more automatic the trust. A detail from your own mother about your own family feels unquestionable, which is exactly why it deserves the same check as a fact from a stranger. So start where trust is easiest to test: the facts that can be matched to paper.

How to Verify Dates, Spellings, and Maiden Names

Verification is a document exercise, not a memory exercise. Before you check a single line, put the paperwork in front of you: the funeral home worksheet or the death certificate, a birth or marriage record, a driver's license, and any program from an earlier family service. Every name, date, and title in the draft should be able to point at one of those pages.

Then work through the draft in a fixed order rather than skimming for anything that looks off. A skim protects the very details that tend to be wrong: middle initials, maiden names, suffixes, and hyphenated surnames. The pass below takes about twenty minutes once the documents are in front of you.

If the Draft Is Still Scattered

Every step above assumes the facts already live in one clean draft rather than across text messages, sticky notes, and a half-finished paragraph in an email. If you still need to build or rebuild that draft, Lovekept's free obituary writer turns the names, dates, and details you have already gathered into an organized first draft, so your fact check has something clean to work against. Once the draft is in one piece, come back and run the six steps against it.

How to Check the Survivors List Against the Family Tree

Names and dates can be matched to a document. The survivors list cannot, which is why it needs a method of its own. The most reliable one is to rebuild the family tree on paper, starting with the person who has passed and working outward, generation by generation, then match every branch of that tree against the draft. Reading the draft first and simply asking whether it looks complete is how names get missed, because a partial list still reads as whole to someone who already knows who belongs on it.

Most publications expect a specific order: spouse first, then children and their spouses, then grandchildren, then great-grandchildren, followed by siblings, and finally parents and other predeceased family. Working through that order one generation at a time, rather than free associating names, is what catches the gap.

Some branches require a judgment call. Stepchildren and stepparents who helped raise, or were raised by, the person usually belong on the list if the family considers them family. Former spouses are typically left out unless children connect the two families. Estranged relatives and unmarried partners are family decisions, not etiquette rules, and there is no single right answer. The phrase "and their families" can carry names that will not fit on the page without listing every one individually.

From working with families through the memorial planning process, this is the section that produces the most hurt feelings, and it is almost always by omission rather than by intent. Nobody sets out to leave a grandchild off the list. It happens because the list was written from memory under a deadline. When the paper cannot hold everyone, an online memorial page can hold the complete list along with the stories behind each name.

How to Confirm Service Times With the Funeral Home and the Church

Confirm every service detail with the venue that controls the room, not with the relative who told you the time. A sister who heard the visitation was moved to two o'clock may be repeating information that was accurate an hour ago and wrong now.

Make three calls. Call the funeral home for the visitation window and the service itself, call the church or venue office for the exact start time and address, and call the cemetery for the committal. Ask for the precise street address, the room or chapel name if the building has more than one, and any note about parking or which entrance to use. Read every detail back to the person on the phone before you hang up.

Watch for three specific risks. A time can shift after the draft was written and nobody circles back to tell the person handling the obituary. A family can be holding two gatherings in one day, a visitation and a separate service, at different times in different places. And a venue name can be shared by two locations in the same city, which sends guests to the wrong building entirely.

Submission deadlines and pricing, whether the paper charges per line or per column inch, vary by publication and change over time, so ask the newspaper directly for its current cutoff rather than assuming a standard one applies. Confirm at the same time whether the funeral home is submitting the obituary on the family's behalf or whether that responsibility falls to the family.

Who in the Family Should Read It Before It Goes Out

Once the facts are sourced, the draft needs other eyes. It needs three readers with three separate jobs, though, not five readers all doing the same read. One factual reader holds the documents and checks names, dates, and spellings against them. One relational reader, ideally from the other side of the family, checks the survivors list for anyone who might be missing. One outside reader barely knew the family, which sounds like a disadvantage but is actually the point.

Here is the part most guides miss: the least connected reader usually catches the most errors. Someone who loved the person reads the version of the obituary they already carry in their head, the same way the writer does. An outside reader has no version to autocomplete, so a wrong date or an unfamiliar spelling actually stops them, where it would slide past a close relative without a second thought.

Give each reader a deadline and one specific question, something closer to "does every date match the funeral home worksheet" than a general "let me know what you think." A vague request produces a vague answer, or no answer at all. Name one person in advance who makes the final call on any disagreement, so the draft does not stall while two relatives debate a spelling the night before it is due.

How to Read It Out Loud to Catch What Your Eye Skips

When the readers have sent their notes back, do one more thing before you submit. Read the finished draft aloud, slowly, to another person. Your eye silently repairs missing words, doubled words, and skipped punctuation as it moves across a page, which is exactly why a silent read cannot be your last check. Your mouth cannot perform the same trick. It will stumble over what your eye would have glided past.

Use a specific technique. Read every name and every number twice. Read punctuation as an actual pause, not just a mark on the page, so a run-on sentence reveals itself. Have your listener follow along on the printed page rather than listening from memory, so they are checking what is actually written, not what they expect to hear.

Reading aloud does double duty. It also exposes padding, repeated phrases, and sentences that run long before you ever notice them silently. If the draft leaves you out of breath partway through a sentence, or you catch yourself repeating a phrase you already used two paragraphs earlier, that is usually a sign the obituary has grown longer than it needs to be. Our guide to how long an obituary should be walks through what to cut first if the draft runs long once you hear it out loud.

What to Check One Last Time on the Proof

When the proof comes back from the newspaper or the funeral home, resist the urge to read it as a whole piece. You already know how it reads. This last pass is about the things that change in production rather than in writing: a line break that splits a name in half, a photo cropped at the shoulders, a web address that lost a character somewhere in the handoff.

Print the proof if you can, and work through the list below one item at a time, marking each as you go. Time is short at this stage, so give one person the job of returning the approval and make sure everyone else knows the review closes before that.

The Version That Lasts

A fact check is not fussiness. It is one of the last practical things you can do for someone, and doing it carefully is its own quiet act of care. An hour with the documents in front of you is what stands between a record the family trusts and a correction nobody wanted to ask for.

The obituary also cannot hold everything, and it was never meant to. Once the facts are right and the notice has run, a memorial page can carry the full survivors list, the stories behind each name, and the photographs that would never fit in a column of newsprint. Lovekept plants a real tree for every memorial created, so the remembering keeps growing long after the paper is folded away.