Since most of my ancestors are in Norway and Italy, I haven't really played around with searching obituaries. I have one ggg-grandmother and her two sons who became members of the LDS church and emigrated from Norway to Utah, whereas her daughter, my gg-grandmother, remained Lutheran and stayed in Norway. It has been really interesting to study my Utah branch, and I have learned a lot about my gg-uncle Martin Christophersen, who was quite prominent in the LDS church and in Salt Lake City. But I have not found much information about my ggg-grandmother Ellen Hansdatter (buried in Salt Lake City under the name Ellen Christophersen) other than a cemetery and burial record.
The other day I was reading one of my favorite blogs, http://herstoryan.blogspot.com/, and a post about finding an exciting obituary, and I immediately thought about my ggg-grandmother Ellen who died in 1899. This is a few years before there are available death records in Utah, so finding an obituary was my only real hope for learning more information. So I thought, "What the heck," and I googled the search term "Utah Newspaper Archives" and found the site http://digitalnewspapers.org/. I then browsed by county, Salt Lake City, and put in the keyword name Ellen Christophersen. The obituary literally took me a minute to find.
Unfortunately, the obituary doesn't say how she died, but it is still a very exciting find! Once I had my first hit, I figured I should try to find the obituaries for Martin and Hans Christophersen. In a matter of minutes I found one for Martin and a funeral announcement for Hans (not shown). The obituary for Martin has a lot of interesting information, so read on...
Stay tuned for more finds.
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