Tara Calishain is the author of hundreds of “Search Gizmos.” Here is her announcement of her latest free offering:
The amount of genealogy content on the Internet is amazing, but it’s a bit hard to search on the open Web. Especially if you’re doing something like looking up obituary notices and your relatives have common names.
I can’t give your relatives new names, but I can make a tool that narrows down the scope of your results and makes finding obituaries easier. So I did. It’s called Obit Magnet and you can find it at https://searchgizmos.com/obit-magnet/ .
It’s easy to use. Enter a name and the date of death for the person you’re searching for, and Obit Magnet makes searches for that name for Google Books (newspapers only), Newspapers.com, NewspaperArchive.com, and Chronicling America. Instead of making the searches open-ended, though, Obit Magnet makes searches for a 7-day span after the date of death and a 15-span if the 7-day span doesn’t catch the obituary.
If the person you’re searching has a middle name, use it in the search. Obit Magnet will automatically create searches with and without a middle name. If you’re searching for a married woman and you have her middle name, enter her full name like this: firstname middlename maidenname lastname. Obit Magnet will automatically generate a full complement of name variations for your search. Here’s what part of the result for John James Smith looks like: