Florida Obituary Records

Florida has become the retirement capital of the world and that means that there are more obituaries for this state than for any other. Luckily, there is also a laundry list of resources available to anyone who has a computer. You can start your search for Florida obituaries by searching the Bay County Index, maintained by the local Genealogical Society. You can perform your search by last name and the listings here go back as far as 1987. Listings in Collier County can be found through the website for the public library. Most of the listings here were published in the local Naples newspaper and go as far back as 1927. The Florida-Times Union has a comprehensive search on their website that goes as far back as 1997. Both Pinellas County and the St. Petersburg Times have online searchable databases you can look through. Finally, the Tampa Tribune has an online searchable index that works through the Hillsborough County Public Library. At this time, newspapers in Orlando, Jacksonville, Miami and Fort Lauderdale are getting similar databases online, too, so you may want to check to see the status of those sites in the future. Florida obituary records are easy to find once you know where to start.