Funeral Cards Online
Background | Search
With a long tradition both in the United States and Europe dating back to the 1800's, funeral cards (also sometimes called
mass, mourning or remembrance cards) are an excellent source of information for genealogists. While not a traditional "vital record", they often provide
great clues like death and birth dates, name of the cemetery where the deceased was interred, name of the funeral
home, and sometimes even a photo of the ancestor.
In her article, Funeral Cards,
Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens explained that, "funeral cards were to be distributed to family members, friends, and the surrounding community in a timely manner to alert invitees to the date and time of the funeral. Recipients of a funeral card were expected to attend the funeral or risk offending family members. Conversely, those who did not receive an invitation would have been insulted, whether it was intentional or an oversight."
At a recent paper show, we stumbled across a bunch of funeral cards in a box labelled "all items ten cents each."
It's hard to imagine that a potentially critical piece of your genealogical puzzle could be reduced to just ten cents, so we bought all 17 of them, scanned each one, and posted them online with the hopes of
reconnecting the information with their descendants.
Since that "ten cent encounter", we've been stumbling across funeral cards all over the place, and we decided to compile
an index and help researchers locate these gems on web sites across the Internet. Much to our surprise, in just one weekend
we discovered 4,312 funeral cards listed online among hundreds of different sites. Many sites just had one or two cards listed.
The database index now includes over 22,700 listings.
Save This Page
If you have some funeral cards you would like to share with other researchers, send us a note.
We'll be glad to include them on the user-contributed funeral cards page and in the database search.
Looking for funeral cards in the United Kingdom? We've setup a page listing the
in memoriam cards from the United Kingdom that are in the collection.
What is Ephemera?
The definition of ephemera is, "something short lived or transitory" especially all types of paper documents both printed or handwritten produced for a specific purpose and normally intended for disposal.
We plan to index all sorts of items into this new database, including family bible pages, marriage announcements, driver's licenses,
military items (e.g. war ration books), and even old business cards. Check out some of the ephemera
items with family history we've found (and purchased) at recent shows.
Related Articles
Coping with a Recent Loss?
The following web sites have articles and offer services for handling the planning of funeral arrangements:
The Funeral Directory.com,
Dealing with Death,
Memorial Print,
Funeral Arrangements (AARP),
Tribute For You,
Remembrance Cards,
Memorial Master,
My Religious Items,
UK Funeral Guide,
If I Should Die (also UK).
