Do most deceased persons in the UK have a death notice in a newspaper nowadays.?
This seemed to come in after WW1, at least in the Westcountry of the UK. You will only ever find obituaries for the masses in local newspapers. I have looked in the microfilms of the Cornish and Devon Post in the local library, and there are only obituaries for the nobility pre-1920, unless the death was unnatural, the more gore the better. I couldn’t find anything about ancestors in earlier years, but I found funeral reports for both my Grandfather and my husband’s Grandfather, both in 1925, and his Great Grandmother in 1926. Even in the later years, there is nothing about small children who died a natural death, obviously such deaths were common and not newsworthy, the deceased being too young to have achieved anything. But policies vary according to editorial policy. Some newspapers here now still publish funeral reports as news items, some don’t. All newspapers carry a family announcements death column. Entries have to be paid for by relatives, and are necessarily short.
