Obituary Requests
The Washington State Library has a free obituary look up service for obituaries in our collection of Washington State newspapers.
Obituary requests are submitted on our Ask-A-Librarian page.
1. Please submit 1 name to research at a time.
Out of fairness to other customers, please submit no more than 5 requests per day.
2. We do not have an obituary index for our newspapers, so you will need to include the following information with your request:
- Name of the person at the time of their death
- Specific Date of death - We need at least the month & the year.
- Location of death in Washington State
- Location of residence in Washington State
- Age
If you need assistance in locating those dates and places, check out the links on our Vital Records page, and on the Obituaries page.
We receive a large volume of requests, so it may be up to 8 weeks before we can respond to your obituary request.
If an obituary is found, a scanned copy will be sent to you as an email attachment.