Council Bluffs, Iowa, Newspaper Obituaries (1870 - Current)

Navigating through piles of historical records to trace your family's roots used to be a challenge. Before, learning about your long-lost relatives meant traveling to various records offices and spending hours going through countless files. At GenealogyBank, we’ve made learning your family history much easier by digitizing over 330 years of Iowa obituaries.

Exploring local newspaper obituaries from Council Bluffs offers several advantages:

• Discover relatives who have been hard to find and add them to your family tree.
• Learn when and how your ancestors lived and died.
• Find out more about the lives of your close and distant family members.

How to Search Council Bluffs, Iowa Obituary Archives

Simply enter your ancestor’s last name and hit the “Search” button to see thousands of entries from Iowa newspapers.

For a more advanced search, follow these steps:

• Step 1: Start with the full name of your relative for more specific results.
• Step 2: Add keywords like a school or town to focus your search.
• Step 3: Exclude certain keywords to avoid results unrelated to your family.
• Step 4: Use a specific year range to filter through common names.
• Step 5: Adjust how you sort the results to see the best matches or the newest or oldest entries first.

Helpful Tips:

• Begin with recent family members, then work your way back to the older ones.
• Try searching by initials, as older obituaries often used them instead of full names.
• If you’re searching for a female relative, you may want to search by her husband’s name.
• Account for common misspellings since names might have been misspelled in older records.

Other Resources to Explore:

• U.S. Newspaper Archives
• Records of Births, Marriages, and Deaths
• Passenger Lists
• Government Publications
• Social Security Death Index
• Archives focused on different cultural and ancestry groups

Get started on tracing your family history with GenealogyBank, and don’t forget to download our free guide, “Tips for Searching Newspapers,” for more help.