Local Obituary Search

Review by eFreeware

Tracking down an obituary usually means guessing which newspaper or funeral home site carried it, then working through each one in turn. When the person died in another state or another country, that guesswork gets harder still, and the notice may sit on a site you have never heard of. Local Obituary Search is built to take some of that work out of the search.

It comes from Jey Apps, and it is free to install on Android. The app has been listed since October 2020 and was updated in July 2026, so it is not a forgotten project. It is ad-supported, there are no in-app purchases, and it carries an Everyone content rating.

What the search actually does

The core of the app is a place-based search: you enter a locale, and it looks for online obituary notices for that area. The place drives the results, not a name or date range.

That makes it a reasonable first step when you know where someone lived or died but not which publication ran the notice. Rather than visiting a string of local news sites one by one, you let the app gather what is out there for that location and work from there.

There is also a language setting alongside the search, so you can pick the language you want to search in. For anyone researching a place where the notices would not be written in English, that option is the difference between a usable result and a page of text you cannot read.

Where it fits into family research

The obvious audience is people doing genealogy or family history. An obituary often supplies details official records leave out, and searching by place is a sensible start when the paper is unknown.

There is a more immediate use too. Executors, distant relatives and former colleagues sometimes need to confirm that a death occurred in a particular area, or to find the family named in a notice before making contact. A place-based search is a quick way to see whether anything was published at all.

Either way, the app can only surface notices that exist online, so coverage varies by place. The 3.4 average from 73 ratings fits a tool whose results depend on what is published.

What you need before you start

Setup is minimal. There is nothing to configure beyond the search itself. You install it, type the place you want to look at, and optionally choose a language, and the app goes looking for notices tied to that locale.

Have the place name ready as it is normally written locally, since the search runs on the locale you type. Beyond that, it suits occasional rather than daily use.

The app is free and funded by ads. There are no in-app purchases, so nothing inside the app asks you to pay to continue. The most recent update was a target API refresh, a maintenance change rather than a new feature, which tells you the developer is keeping the app current without adding to it.

A niche tool for a specific search

This is a narrow app, and that is fine. It does one job: finding obituary notices online by place. If your search starts with a name and no known location, it gives you less.

It suits genealogists, family historians and anyone handling the practical side of a death in a known area. It also works as a companion to other research rather than a replacement for it, since the notices it finds are the ones already published on the web.

With more than 10,000 installs, it has found a small but real audience. The free price and the absence of purchases keep the barrier low, and the ad support is the trade-off you accept for that.

A place-first search worth trying for family research

Local Obituary Search is worth installing if you already know the area you want to search and just need a quicker way to see what obituary notices are out there. The place field and the language option cover the basics, and the free, ad-supported model means there is nothing to lose by trying it on a name you have been stuck on.

Go in expecting a starting point rather than a complete archive. Results track what has been published online for that locale, so a quiet area will yield less than a busy one, and the mixed ratings reflect that reality. For genealogists and anyone confirming a death in a known place, it is a straightforward tool to keep on hand.

What's new in version 12

Target API updated