THE RYERSON INDEX

to death notices and obituaries in Australian newspapers

COMBINING DEATH and FUNERAL NOTICES

 

It is common to find one notice which contains both death and funeral information.

It also happens that both a death notice and a funeral notice is published on the same day for the same person.

This is a guide to indexing these two cases.

It is important to remember just what we are indexing, and why we are doing it. The objective of the Ryerson Index is to provide a reference to DEATH information. Nothing more, just death information. That means the primary date we wish to index is the death date.

We provide for the entry of three different type of dates. They are, in decreasing order of importance:

  1. Death date
  2. Funeral date
  3. Publication date

Combined Death and Funeral Notice

The points above mean, when a notice contains both death and funeral dates, we index only the death date - because it is the more important date to satisfy our objective. When a notice contains neither death nor funeral date, then we index the publication date as a "date of last resort". And if the funeral date is the only date we have available then we use it in preference to the publication date.

When a notice contains both death and funeral dates, we do not create a second entry for the funeral date. One notice, one entry in Ryerson - that's it.

Separate Death and Funeral Notices for the Same Person

When we have both a death notice and a funeral notice for what is, in the opinion of the indexer, certain to be the same person, then we combine the information in both notices to generate just one entry in Ryerson. For a full explanation of how to decide whether to merge notices, see the web page onMerging of Notices

We do this by first indexing the notice which contains the most information (usually the death notice, as it contains the death date). We then add to the entry with any additional information we can glean from the other (usually the funeral) notice. Note that it is quite common to get nothing extra from a funeral notice, because its sole purpose is to advise friends and relatives of the funeral details, and so it is likely to contain less of interest to us than the death notice.

This page is owned by Ryerson Index Inc, a non-profit organisation incorporated under the laws of New South Wales, Australia. The last update was December 29th, 2008.