Obituaries

AHSGR has in its collection approximately 200,000 obituaries placed on 5 X 8 cards that have been collected by volunteers for about 25 years. It has been a dream for many years to prepare an index that can be easily used by researchers whether they are at the main headquarters or perhaps at a convention or now 24 hours a day located on our web site. Several years ago, some volunteers in Lincoln joined together to begin building an index to the obituary collection. Many of the Lincoln Headquarters collection were indexed before the effort stopped. The Save Our Ancestral Records (SOAR) obituary project has replaced this manual indexing project with the same vision and goal for allowing researchers to have electronic and searchable access to the collection.

The original indexing effort completed work for many of the obituaries and this result can be accessed with the links at the top of this section.  All are cross-referenced. If you are searching for a woman, please check for her maiden name, if you know it. Some of the women married more than once, and if the obituary listed these marriages those have been included as well.

If you find an obituary that you would like to order, please refer to the research request form.

How to read this obituary index

Lets take Maggie (Zimmerman) Moser, Gruebele, Aanerud, who was born on 15 Nov 1914 as an example.

Here is how she is listed on the A list (the first entry)
Surname / Married Name, First name, (Maiden name), *Birth date
Aanerud , Maggie , (Zimmerman) Moser, Gruebele, *15 Nov 1914

Aanerud is what the lady's obituary states is her last name at the time of her death.
It is her last married name. This particular lady had 3 husbands, each is separated by a comma.
As stated in the obituary (Zimmerman) was her maiden name.
Husband #1 was Moser
Husband #2 was Gruebele
Husband #3 was Aanerud
* means date of birth

Search Tips

The linked surnames placed along the top and bottom of each page are there to help you jump quickly to different sections of the page. There are many more surnames than just the few listed on each page.

Search for various spellings of the names you are looking for. The letter C and the letter K was often used interchangeably such as Conrad and Konrad or Catherine and Katherine. Also search for both the German and American versions of a given name such Heinrich and Henry or Maria, Marie and Mary. Don't forget about looking for shortened names such as Kate or nick-names such as Jack.

For surnames with umlauts the proper spelling would be : ä = ae, ö = oe, ü = ue. As an example the surname Görlitz should be spelled Goerlitz. But Görlitz is just as commonly spelled Gorlitz, or Gerlitz so be sure to look for those spelling variations.