When searching for an ancestor, one of the places that may serve us well is one which most of us neglect.

Funeral home records may assist you in learning about your ancestors who are further back, in a time when it wasn’t necessary to issue a death certificate, or in some cases, when those were lost, such as is common in the years surrounding the Civil War.

Learning how to garner information from a funeral home will serve you well when researching ancestors further in the past.

Funeral homes, unlike many businesses, tend to not change hands really often and are quite often passed down in the family for several generations.
The same funeral home or mortuary will very often be used by several members of  the same family and  smaller towns will usually have one or two funeral homes, while even the largers ones will sometimes only have a dozen or so to choose from.

Each of these facts are going to be something that will assist you in narrowing down the search for the funeral home or mortician that helped to bury your ancestor.

There are also clues that will help you to find the mortician who had a hand in the burial of your family member.
If there is a death certificate, that will usually list the name of the funeral home or mortician.
For times or areas where the death certificate wasn’t necessary, there may be what are known as funeral cards.
These are small cards that are passed out at the funeral to family and friends, which have some information about the deceased, as well as quite often a small poem or a particular passage from the bible or other book that has meaning in the circumstances.

Usually these are ordered from the funeral home and quite often have the name of the funeral home on them. Your family members may have kept one, or have it in their possession.

Prior to heading for the funeral home however you’re going to need some kind of information about your ancestor, such as an approximate time frame.

Remember this as well. This business is private and as such is not required to offer any information to you at all. It will serve you well to be less than insistent and more than polite when asking for information they may have. Contact them by letter or email ahead of time asking if they might, when it is convenient for them, seek out the record that you need.

If you suddenly appear and ask for something, when in fact they may have ten funerals that day, chances are that you’re not going to get a positive response to your request.

Also, it might be in your best interest to offer to pay for any incurred expenses such as copying the file for you. They will be far more likely to help you in the future.

When you truly are at your wits end, the funeral home may be a last resort that will serve you well in your search for an ancestors information.

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