Millions of Entries Erased Overnight from World’s Largest Obituary Database
Millions of Entries Erased Overnight from World’s Largest Obituary Database
And hundreds of thousands more also deleted in short periods of time
Legacy.com is a website where you can search what it says is “the world’s largest obituary database,” with nearly 50,000,000 entries accumulated since the site started publishing death notices in 1998.
The Web site hosts obituaries and memorials for more than 70 percent of all U.S. deaths. Legacy.com hosts obituaries for more than three-quarters of the 100 largest newspapers in the U.S., by circulation. The site attracts more than 30 million unique visitors per month and is among the top 40 trafficked websites in the world.
Although it does not appear to have an “About Us” page right now, I was able to locate one from 2019 [https://new.legacy.com/about-us/] and one at a different URL with no apparent date [https://sales.legacy.com/about/]. Both say it is “a top-50 website in the U.S. with more unique monthly visitors than Wikipedia, Netflix, or LinkedIn.”
The site also claims to “offer users a permanent, shareable space to commemorate the lives of their loved ones” with “5000+ funeral home, newspaper, and advertising partners.”
Given the claim that Legacy.com offers a “permanent” space for commemoration, the recent discoveries by an alert researcher raise some interesting questions.
Here are the findings:
Between June 6th and Jun 7th 2024, approximately 2.3 million obituaries disappeared from the running tally that has been kept by Legacy.com since 1998. This represents a deletion of approximately 5% of the tally.
Here are the tallies provided by the site (accessed on the Wayback Machine at legacy.com/obituaries/search):
June 5, 2024: 49,999,655
June 6, 2024: 50,006,650
June 7, 2024: 47,690,240
Between August and September 2024, at least 200,000 obituaries disappeared from the tally.
Prior to June 2024, tens of thousands of additional obituaries were removed from the tally, as follows:
September 2023: deletion of 46,000+
October 2023: deletion of 30,000+
November 2023: deletion of 43,000+
December 2023: deletion of 57,000+
January 2024: deletion of 48,000+
The method used by the researcher (who prefers to remain anonymous, and who publishes on Substack under the name csofand) to obtain these numbers is detailed here:
Here:
And in additional posts on the csofand Substack, including this one:
I have spoken with csofand and reviewed the findings, and they appear to be authentic and reliable.
Why were the obituaries deleted from the Legacy.com tally?
Before trying to speculate as to why large numbers of records were removed from the running tally on the site, I reached out to Legacy.com to ask if they could offer an explanation.
I received the following response from Stephen Segal, Senior Director of Content Development:
Legacy.com serves as a hosting platform for thousands of local obituary publishing partners around the English-speaking world, including local news companies and local funeral homes. The total number of obituary records live on Legacy.com fluctuates as we keep our database in routine compliance with the technical and contractual requirements of our partnerships.
I inferred from this response that the deletions did in fact occur – at least there was no denial from Mr. Segal, nor any claim to the contrary.
I followed up in an email with these questions:
1. Can you tell me what type of "technical and contractual requirements" of your partnerships might require such massive removals of entries in a short period of time?
2. What type of requirement occurred on June 6, 2024 that led to millions of deletions? Given that this is a very specific date and a very specific number of deletions, the database will no doubt reflect who was responsible for the deletions. Can you tell me who it was and why they were deleting such a huge number of entries?
3. Do you have any examples of such massive removals from before 2021?
Mr. Segal emailed back that “Legacy has nothing further to add at this time beyond what we shared initially.”
Which, I guess, means: It’s speculation time.
Some possible explanations for the Legacy.com obituary tally deletions
Routine compliance
As Mr. Segal suggests, the deletions might be part of “routine compliance” involving “technical and contractual requirements” that lead to fluctuating numbers of records on the site.
Considering the huge numbers and sudden deletions, this seems rather unlikely.
Deleting Covid vax-related deaths
Given the intense interest in death rates and causes following the rollout of the Covid mRNA injections in 2021, whoever is in charge of Legacy.com, or someone with decision-making power over the company, could be deleting the records of people who might have died as a result of receiving the shots.
At first, I thought this was a likely explanation. However, csofand has also been researching obituaries with keywords that might be linked to vax-related deaths, including “sudden,” “brief illness” and “sudden” + “cardiac.” This research is described here:
What csofand discovered is that, while there was not a big change in the frequency of those keywords between February and June 2024, there was a big decrease in the overall tally. So the deletions seem to not encompass just deaths that are known or suspected to be related to the shots. Furthermore, such targeted removals would be difficult to carry out and might attract the notice of family and friends whose loved ones died recently.
Deleting random records to reduce the overall count
Given the intense scrutiny of various databases to try to figure out the numbers of excess deaths around the world after the rollout of the mRNA shots, someone might be deleting large numbers of obituary records simply to lower the overall death count.
This explanation makes the most sense to me, considering what csofand has found in terms of key words. It also makes sense because if millions of recent records were removed, the friends and relatives who commemorated the deceased on Legacy.com might notice. But if millions of much older records (say from the late 1990s and early 2000s) were deleted, it’s less likely that anyone would notice.
Additional research
In order to figure out which specific obituaries were removed from Legacy.com, we would need to explore the Wayback Machine in ways that csofand and I have yet to figure out.
There is another curious artifact: Searching on Google for Legacy.com/obituaries leads to an error page. Searching for this URL on the Wayback Machine leads to a calendar with a lot of blue circles indicating snapshots, but all of them lead to blank white pages. (for example: https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://www.legacy.com/obituaries)
An inquiry about this has been submitted to the Internet Archive. An initial response redirected the inquiry to info@archive.org. We are awaiting a response.
If readers have any additional information about any of these findings, please add to the comments below.
I have found in my research that some of my newspapers require a subscription to view actual obituaries. They may be removing some that are behind paywalls, perhaps? Also in my papers of where I grew up, many people are not publishing obits at all. The obits are being published by the funeral homes only. A classmate of mine died and only the name was published, no obit. So, this removal of obits may be related to the "monetization" of information that is now occurring.
Important as The Archive has specifically denied any loss of data from their recent cyber attack. Could the missing obits bv evidence of election interference?