What to Include in an Obituary: A Checklist

What to Include in an Obituary: How to Use This Checklist

Most families do not stall on an obituary because the writing is hard. They stall because the facts are scattered: a legal name that only appears on the death certificate, a job title one sibling remembers differently than another, a service time still waiting on a callback from the funeral home. You cannot write a good sentence around information you do not have yet.

This page is a gathering checklist, not a writing guide. Work through it before you open a blank document, and you will have everything in hand before you draft a single line. The sections below follow roughly the order a funeral home or newspaper will ask for the details, starting with the facts no notice can run without and ending with the optional extras most families wish they had decided on sooner.

Keep it beside you while you make calls and sort through paperwork. When you are ready to build the piece itself, the structure, templates, and full examples live in our guide to how to write an obituary step by step.

The Facts You Cannot Publish an Obituary Without

An obituary cannot run without six pieces of information. A newspaper desk or funeral home will send the notice back until each one is confirmed:

• Full legal name: the name a newspaper or funeral home will run without alteration, the one that also appears on any legal notices.
• Nickname or maiden name, if used: include either or both so friends, former classmates, and extended family searching for the notice actually recognize who it is about.
• Age: confirmed against the date of birth and date of passing, not calculated from memory.
• City and state of residence: tells readers where to place this person, and often determines which local paper will run the notice.
• Date of passing: the anchor date for the entire notice, and the one detail a paper will never publish without.
• A line about services or where to direct condolences: even a single sentence pointing readers to a memorial page or a family address gives people somewhere to send their support.

Cause of passing is the one exception on this list, and it is entirely optional. Whether to include it, and how much detail to share, is always the family's choice, not an editorial requirement. Many obituaries omit it entirely, and that is completely appropriate.

For the date of birth specifically, many funeral directors suggest publishing only the birth year rather than the full date. A complete birth date paired with a full name and hometown gives identity thieves more than they need, and leaving off the day and month costs the obituary nothing in meaning.

Once these six facts are confirmed, a first draft is closer than it feels. Lovekept's free obituary writer can turn them into a starting draft in minutes, one you can then build on with everything else in this checklist.

Which Dates and Places to Confirm Before You Write

Some details are easy to get right because there is one obvious source. Others get fuzzy fast, especially when you are relying on a relative's memory of an event that happened decades ago. Confirm each of the following against a document before it goes into your draft:

• Full legal and maiden name: confirm against a driver's license, passport, or the death certificate. A misspelled maiden name is one of the most common corrections families request after publication.
• Date of birth: confirm against a birth certificate or Social Security card. Relatives often round to the wrong day when recalling from memory.
• Date of passing: confirm against the death certificate. This date anchors every other detail in the notice.
• Birthplace: confirm against a birth certificate or a long-standing family record. City and county lines can shift depending on who is remembering.
• City and state of residence: confirm with the funeral home's intake paperwork, especially if your loved one moved in recent years.
• Marriage date and place: confirm against a marriage certificate or with the surviving spouse directly. This is an easy detail to approximate wrong by a year.
• Military service dates: confirm against discharge paperwork or service records. Branch, rank, and years of service are frequently swapped between similar eras or conflicts.

Corrections after an obituary has already run are difficult. Many newspapers charge for a corrected reprint, and the correction rarely reaches everyone who read the original notice. It is worth the extra ten minutes to check a document instead of trusting memory.

What to Include About Their Work and Education

Career and education details answer one question: what did they do with their days? Include the employer and role that meant the most, the years or decades they gave to it, and any military branch and service period if they served. Degrees, schools, trade certifications, and any award a reader would recognize round out the picture.

You do not need to list every job someone held. Choose the work that defined them, not their full resume. A good rule of thumb: two to three lines is plenty, unless their career genuinely was the story of their life, in which case let it run longer.

For a father, work history often carries much of the emotional weight of the whole obituary. The trade he practiced for thirty years, the business he built, the uniform he wore: these details do a lot of the storytelling on their own. Our guide to writing an obituary for a father walks through templates built specifically around that dynamic.

What to Include About Hobbies, Faith, and Community

Personal detail is what makes an obituary sound like the person, not a form. Include their congregation or faith community, any volunteer roles, the clubs or teams they belonged to, and the hobby they kept up for decades. The goal is not a complete list of interests. It is the handful of details that make someone recognizable.

One concrete image beats three general adjectives every time. "Loving and generous" could describe almost anyone. "The garden she tended until the week she turned ninety" or "the corner booth he claimed at the diner every Saturday morning" tells a reader exactly who this person was.

If you are struggling to find that detail, ask two relatives to tell you the same story about the person. The version that keeps coming up, the one both of them mention without being prompted, is usually the detail worth including. That approach does the most work when you are writing an obituary for a mother or writing an obituary for a grandmother, where the memories that surface tend to cluster around a handful of very specific, very repeatable moments.

It is worth pausing here, before the survivors list and the service logistics, to remember why you are gathering any of this. These details are what let someone be recognized years from now, by people who never had the chance to meet them.

What the Survivors Section Has to Cover at Minimum

At minimum, the survivors section needs to cover five groups: the surviving spouse or partner, children listed with their spouses, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, surviving parents, and siblings. If the list of grandchildren or great-grandchildren runs long, it is acceptable to list them by count rather than by name. A separate line for those who predeceased them, meaning family members who passed before this person, usually follows.

Funeral directors commonly advise a consistent order: spouse first, then children from oldest to youngest, then grandchildren, then parents and siblings. When someone lived with family at the time of passing, you will often see the phrase "of the home," followed by their city, to distinguish them from relatives living elsewhere. Blended families, stepchildren, in-laws, and long-term partners all deserve a place in this list. The simplest approach is to name the relationship plainly, such as "stepson" or "daughter-in-law," without ranking one relationship above another.

In our experience helping families through this process, the survivors list causes more friction than any other part of an obituary. Someone is always afraid a name will be left out, spelled wrong, or listed in a way that feels like it minimizes their place in the family. The fix is simple: before you submit anything, read every name on the list aloud to one other relative. Check every spelling, and ask directly who might be missing. That five-minute phone call prevents most of the disputes that surface after a notice has already been published.

What Service Details to Gather From the Funeral Home

Your funeral director is the best source for six details: the visitation date, time, and address; the service date, time, and location; the name of the officiant; the burial or interment location; any reception details; and the preferred wording for memorial donations in lieu of flowers. Ask for all six in one conversation so you are not calling back repeatedly as a deadline approaches.

The funeral home usually holds the confirmed spelling of every venue name involved, and staff can tell you which newspaper or outlet the notice is running in, since many funeral homes handle that submission directly. Do not assume you remember a venue's exact name or address correctly, even one you have visited many times.

From working with families through the memorial planning process, the detail that most often gets published wrong is a venue address that changed since the family last visited. A church relocated, a reception hall closed, a cemetery added a new entrance: these changes happen quietly, and a family working from memory has no way to catch them. Confirming the address directly with the funeral home, even for a familiar place, takes one phone call and prevents a wasted trip for anyone attending.

The Optional Extras Most Families Forget to Include

A handful of additions are easy to forget until after the notice has already run, and by then it is too late to add them without a second submission. Consider a short thank-you to caregivers or hospice staff, a named charity for memorial donations, a beloved pet who was part of the family, or a favorite quotation or line of scripture that captures who they were.

The addition that matters most is a link or QR code to an online memorial. A print notice is fixed the moment it is published. It cannot grow, and it cannot hold every photo or story people want to share once word gets out. An online memorial page keeps collecting those contributions for as long as people want to visit it. Our guide to memorial tree planting covers one more living option worth considering alongside a digital tribute.

Setting up that page takes only a few minutes, and you can include the link in the obituary itself once it is ready. You can create an online memorial before the notice runs, or plant a tree in their honor as a second living tribute that grows alongside the digital one.

Frequently Asked Questions About Obituary Information

A few quick answers to the questions families ask most while gathering these details.

Once Your Checklist Is Full

When every line on this page has an answer, the hardest part is behind you. What is left is arrangement, covered fully in our guide to obituary format and structure: open with the name and the anchor dates, move through the life, then close with survivors, service details, and where to send support. Read the finished notice aloud once before you submit it. The ear catches a wrong date or an awkward phrase faster than the eye does.

The same notes will carry you further than the obituary alone. If you are also speaking at the service, our eulogy writer turns the details you have already gathered into something you can speak from, and the rest of our guides to remembrance and memorial planning are here whenever you need them. Take the next step when you are ready, and not a moment before.