Common Obituary Mistakes

An obituary is written once, quickly, by someone exhausted. Then it is printed two hundred times. These are the errors that survive that process, roughly in order of how much upset they cause.

1. Leaving someone out of the survivor list

The single most damaging mistake, and almost never deliberate. Stepchildren, a long-term partner who was never married in, an in-law who was family in every sense — these get missed because the writer is listing from memory at midnight.

Write the list, then hand it to one other family member and ask them to read it looking for who is not there. Do not ask "does this look right"; ask "who is missing".

2. The survivor list in the wrong order

Convention runs closest family outward: spouse, then children with their spouses, then grandchildren, then siblings. Within a generation, oldest to youngest. People notice when a younger sibling is listed first, and some of them will remember it for years.

3. Confusing "survived by" and "preceded in death by"

Survived by means still living. Preceded in death by means they died first. Getting these backwards is common when a paragraph is rewritten late, and it is the kind of error that causes a phone call.

4. Name spellings

• Maiden names, and whether she used one.
• Jr., Sr., II and III — and whether the deceased was the Sr.
• Married surnames of daughters and granddaughters.
• Nicknames in quotation marks, spelled the way that person spells it.
• Middle initials, present or absent, consistently.

Check names against something written — a Christmas card list, a phone contact — rather than from memory. Nobody is spelling well on day two.

5. Dates that do not match the documents

Birth years get transposed and death dates shift by a day when someone died late at night. Check both against the death certificate or the funeral home's paperwork, not against what anyone remembers. The obituary often becomes the family's reference copy, and an error here propagates into genealogy records for decades.

6. Service details that cannot be acted on

• Venue name without a street address — church names repeat across towns.
• A time without a date.
• No indication of whether the service is open to all or family only.
• A reception mentioned with no location.

Put the venue into a map application and confirm it resolves to the right place before this goes to print.

7. Writing that could belong to anyone

Not an error exactly, but the most common regret. "She loved her family and will be deeply missed by all who knew her" is true of almost everyone who has ever died. One concrete detail — what she said when she answered the phone, what he kept in the truck — does more than a paragraph of adjectives.

The proofing checklist

1. Read the whole thing aloud. You will hear a wrong sentence before you see it.
2. Check every name against something written down.
3. Check both dates against a document.
4. Hand the survivor list to another family member and ask who is missing.
5. Confirm the venue address on a map.
6. Leave it an hour, then read it once more before it goes anywhere.