Workshop: Write Your Own Obituary

Hello. Welcome to everyone that are joining us for our webinar today. We're just going to hang out for a couple more seconds and let people in from the waiting room. So, thanks for your patience. All right, we're going to go ahead and get started. Uh, we just hit 25 attendees. We had about 75 people registered. So, hopefully we'll have some late comers coming in. Uh, but I got a packed schedule for today. So, let's go ahead and do it. So, welcome to the SFPL workshop. Write your own obituary. We'd like to pause, take a minute to say that San Francisco Public Library sits on the unseated ancestral homeland of the Ramayat Aloney peoples and we give thanks for our ability to work, learn, and study here. We put the full land acknowledgement in the chat, so you can check that out. Hello, my name is Kelsey. I'm a librarian in the magazines and newspaper center here at the main library and I'm joined by my colleague Jonathan who's the personal finance librarian and he's going to be helping me run this show smoothly today. So he'll be answering questions on chat or helping me see questions on chat and putting links in the chat of things that I refer to. So how many of you just attended the legacy planning workshop that Jonathan hosted a couple hours ago? I think maybe you could put it in the chat or raise your hand. Um, however, yeah. So, I see Anita raised her hand. Cool. Anita, hope you learned something great from the legacy planning for this work, we're going to talk about writing your ownuary because that is a type of legacy planning that's a little bit different. So, in the magazines and newspaper centers on the fifth floor of the main library and we offer a service called the obituary request service. So we get requests from people all over the world who are asking us to look up obituaries from really long time ago from the historic newspapers and also people asking us for obituaries of people they know that have passed recently within the last couple months. So we're kind of experts on the topic of obituaries, what kind of content goes into them and uh the conventions of the form. And when we're here in this workshop today thinking about our own obituaries and our own legacy of our life story, it's kind of a tough topic, right? So, we're all going to die and that can be pretty dis discouraging at moments when you're enjoying living your life. But perhaps we can feel a little bit less afraid to die if we can write our own obituary and think about the great life that we've lived and what we want to leave for the people after us. So today my goals for you are to give you a start in writing the content of your obituary and also give you an idea of where you can publish it and how much it will cost to publish it. So the cost is not negligible. So that is definitely something that's um a financial aspect that we'll talk about too. So we're going to go ahead and get started with an activity. So hopefully you've got a piece of paper and a pen or a pencil and I want you to take about five minutes to respond to this prompt. Imagine it's the moments immediately following your death. What do you want the people you just left behind to know as they cope with your absence over the next few months? So, Jonathan is putting that prompt in the chat and so you can think about it, draft some ideas down, and I'm going to start a timer for five minutes. Hey, we have a little bit less than a minute remaining, so we can wrap up your thoughts on what you're jotting down. Okay. So, hopefully you got some good stuff down there. I wrote a couple things down myself and even though I've been preparing to give this presentation to you all for a while, I hadn't really thought about, you know, bigger message or whatever. So that was interesting for me too. Okay. So now we're going to do another activity. So turn the page or get a new piece of paper out. Now imagine it's 100 years after your death. What do you want your descendants doing geneal genealogy research to know? So take another five minutes, maybe we'll make it a little bit shorter, maybe four four minutes or so, and write that down and see. Um, imagine yeah 100 years in the future. Maybe now is a good time to start wrapping up whatever you're jotting down if you're uh in the middle of a But okay, so now we're going to bring it all together with a third activity, which is to reflect on the differences between the two things that you just wrote down. So, there's two very different audiences that you're thinking about writing to when you wrote your your ideas of what you want to include in your orbituary. Were there different pieces of information that you included one or the other? Um, were it pretty much the same? So, take a couple minutes to reflect on that and please share in the chat. I would love to hear from you how those differed for you. Maybe there's no difference at all. Maybe it was wildly different. Um I think if any of you out there have done genealogy research or are interested in that, you know that different questions animate that process than um the people who are mourning someone that they just lost and what they want to see in an obituary. So, I'll take a uh give you a couple minutes to uh write that down. Put it in the chat or um just write it for yourself on your own notebook. So, I really like the comments that people are sharing already. Um, see here, Gloria mentions that she wants anyone um in 100 years from now to know that she didn't belong to one country but was a resident of the world of mother earth. Mary asked a question about if other people care about the family genealogical materials. Um, it's hard to know because when people are really young, maybe they don't care about it as much, but I think it's something that people start caring about more the older they get and the more interesting pieces of information they find in their family history. Uh earlier in response to the first question um Angelita shared something very tender that most importantly that they should know that I love them. Thank them for sharing their lives with me and that I enjoyed my life and had a great one. So enjoyed their life as well. I love that positivity and just the the tender the tenderness of it. Um Mary has uh shared a couple things as well and she's getting all of her stuff in order. So uh that's really great. Good job, Mary. Um, let's see here. Uh, Marina shares that there was some overlap between the two, especially the factual information. And Angelita shares that um she would like them to know the ups and downs of how it was for me living in an immigrant in in the United States. So, as I reflected on it and seeing the differences of what people really really want to have when they're doing genealogical research way down the line, um they want stories of the family as a whole and they want to know how you fit into the whole. And so I was just doing my little freewrite and thinking how would I describe um how my family kind of dispersed over the United States and how some people had children, some people didn't. um everyone pretty much has been leaving California when our grandparents originally had come to California. So those like rhythms of the bigger picture is maybe what I would put thinking about the audience of 100 years in the future. But I think that all of this really brings up some important questions that are kind of philosophic questions about obituaries. Are obituaries for us? Are they our messages to our survivors or are they for others? Are they for these genealogologists in the future? Are they for our children who might read it? Are they for our distant colleagues that we haven't seen maybe in 20 years but are want to know about our passing? And you know, I was just telling some co-workers uh before this started that I was going to be doing this and and people said, "I love reading obituaries." So maybe you're writing your obituary for a complete stranger and they you're going to give them a little bit of a thrill. And so these are all things to keep in mind as you decide what information to include and what information to leave out and also where you're going to publish it. So there's kind of like these three pillars to an obituary and why it matters. So the first one is the notification of the death. So this is concerning the present moment of letting old friends, former colleagues, distant acquaintances know that you have passed and any plans for service, funeral, memorial, stuff like that. Then the second pillar is about your personal legacy in terms of the narrative that you're going to provide. So this is not only your opportunity to share the facts of your life, but also your worldview, um your voice, your unique quirks, your foibless, all of those things can come out as you're writing your own obituary. And then third, there's this audience way in the future that we've been talking about, which is the genealogical research or the genealogical record. And this is archiving for the future. So unless you're, you know, really famous or did something really important that was lasting in the cultural record, the only piece of evidence of your life 100 years years later will be this obituary. And so you know this is an important moment to say what do I need to be in that and what is going to be left of my history. So let's look at some definitions. So, I have the actual definition of the orbituary from the Oxford English dictionary. It's actually pretty long if you look it up in the Oxford English dictionary, which you can do through the library subscriptions, but um the brief version is an appreciation of a person who has recently died, typically including a brief biography. So, the brief biography is the main thing that we're talking about today. And in the old days or if you're pretty famous, this was written by a staff journalist. And nowadays, it's really more about um being self-authored or family authored. And um unfortunately, gone are the days where a lot of newspapers did employ a journalist to do obituaries for random members of the community. Um that definitely doesn't really happen in San Francisco anymore. So, it is important for you or your family to do it. Now, contrast this with the death notice. And the death notice is really more functional and brief. And it's about uh also known as a funeral announcement. And it's about telling people, okay, here's the basic information. You died um and you're having a service. It's going to be at this funeral or this cemetery at this time. and the funeral or cremation service that you're working with, it's their responsibility to pay for the newspaper to publish that. So, if you are taking care of a lot of your legacy stuff and you've made arrangements um at a cemetery or crem cremation service, then this is something you talk to them about making sure they have the right information to be published. And so here's a basic anatomy of what the chronicle calls a tribute, but we can kind of interchangeably use the terms obituary, death notice, funeral arrange, funeral announcement or a life tribute. So the very top we have the basics. So this um part in blue. So you want names including maiden names if um important and also sometimes they recommend putting nicknames in. So from a searching perspective, what we do in the magazines and newspaper center, people will often give a full name of somebody like their first name, their middle name, and their last name. And they will use that to go search in a newspaper and we don't find the thing because the person actually just went by their first name and their last name. So I suggest using whatever type of um that you were whatever format you were commonly known as. So if you did commonly use your middle name in your dealings with the world in a public way, then include that, but otherwise you could probably leave it out. Then so you want when you were born, where you were born, where you died, when you died, and where you died. And then the second part is this part in green, which is number two, the life story or like the heart. And so this is the biography. Um, so this is your schooling, your military service, your career milestones, hobbies, your personal quirks. Um, any little funny detail that you want to include. And this is really where your personality and your unique voice can come out. Then we have the portion about the survivors. And so, you know, you list your if your spouse survives you, uh, your children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, even pets or very close friends, um, community members that you were close to. Um, sometimes if you're going to do a longer one, you can also do those that predesceased you. So, you know, if your parents died before you, you could say that, you know, include that information. And this is those are the type of details that's really important for the genealogologist and the person in the future. Uh then lastly or next to last we have number four an appreciation. So it's commonly included to thank uh friends and healthcare workers that were there for you in your end of your life. I do want to point out that in this one it says we would also like to thank his caregivers. And so this one is told from the perspective of the survivors. And so it's in um their from their perspective as I guess um not the first person and not the third person but like we and then um number five is service details. So, this is like what we talked about if there's going to be a funeral or um a spreading of a service to spread the ashes or whatever. And if there's going to be a celebration of life for or a memorial at a later time, I would encourage you to put that too that it will be scheduled later cuz that's something that people who are dealing with um the who mourning the death like in the moment or contemporary mourers that's something that they want to know is you know how can I go to the grave or is there a funeral or a memorial service where I can pay my respects. So, I shared with you all a handout. And so, this is kind of a takeaway that you'll have to refer back to after our webinar here is done. And so, um, maybe you have it printed out. Um, maybe you just have it on your computer, but I have a screenshot of it here. And, um, Jonathan is also putting a link to it on Google Drive in the chat. So, you can click on that link and then download it from there if you would like. And so on this on the front page of this handout, there's this colored table that has a lot of details for the kind of information you can decide to include in your obituary. And this is adapted from one of the books that we recommend that you can use to guide your writing of an obituary. So it's adapted from Laura Brown. And I want to encourage you just to take a moment to go through this and determine what you think would be valuable information that you would include in your obituary. So if you have a printed one, maybe you can just circle or star the things that you think are important. Um, if you have a digital one, maybe you can just look at it and jot down on your on your notepad or your note paper what you think is important. So I'll give you a couple minutes to look through that. There's basically um about uh six sections. There's the basics of the name announcement and then that's kind of in green if um if you can see colors the green top left portion. Then there's this middle purple left portion survived by. So these are the kinds of people that you might want to mention. And then there's on the bottom left in the blue section there's predesceased by. So the people who have died before you and then uh going over to the right column there's the facts of your life. So when you were born um important milestones stuff like that kind of that's where the biography is and then there's the service port part the middle the yellow part in the middle on the right and then the closing which is the bottom right. So feel free to put any reflections you have about this and what you would include and not include in the chat and I'll be looking looking through to see what you all are And Um, I I'm loving the feedback that everyone's been putting in the chat. Um, hopefully I'll get a chance to boost it all. But I like Daniel's question if it's appropriate to address the darker instances of our lives or if we should only have the good things. And that's totally up to you. But I have some examples that we're going to look at uh uh in a little bit where we get a mix of the good and the bad and the honest. And so you can see uh the effect that it has and and what you think of it. And Daniel also has a question about celebration of life services. Do they need to be announced? And what if you want to keep it private? Yeah, I think you could just mention that they'll be um a private service with close friends and family only or something like that. Um, or you could just leave it out and then replace that with something about if you want to make a a memorial donation, do so to this place and this honor um in in the honor of the deceased or whatever. And Christy mentions that she would love to add add places that she loved to travel or visit to. And I have a longer form that does ask that kind of information that uh we'll get to towards the end as well. This is kind of like really the basics. Yeah. And so I think so thank you all for um giving your feedback. And Brenda Grant, can an obituary be too long? It's like that joke too long didn't read, right? Um I guess it's a good question. If it's published online, there's no such thing as too long because it's just digital ple pixels and it you don't have to pay per line. But if you're paying in a newspaper, yeah, probably you don't want to spend like five grand on your obituary or whatever. Um, but I think that at some point a really long obituary that you wrote yourself crosses over into memoir. And so, um, maybe if it is really long, just think about writing your memoirs instead. Um, so we just did this. You looked at the handout and decided what would be important information. And if you have more questions about that as we go forward, please feel free to put them in in the chat. Um, Daniel mentioned AI is a great help for too long and I have uh some anecdotes about that as well that I hope we have time to get to. All right. So now the question of where to publish. I already kind of hinted at the difference between publishing online versus publishing in a paper. So this is kind of the snapshot of the situation right now. So there's local and national newspapers. And so, uh, for example, in our area in San Francisco specifically, the two main newspapers that are printed still besides the little local papers, the neighborhood papers are the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner. The San Francisco Examiner does not print obituaries in the print paper anymore, but they do have a website, which we'll talk about later. So the San Francisco Chronicle is really the only place that you can get a print obituary published related to specifically San Francisco. And I'll talk about some other regional options later. Then there's these um digital hubs that aggregate or or syndicate obituaries from print papers. So legacy.com is a great example of that. And so if you publish an obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle, it also gets published online on the legacy.com website. And other um newspapers in the area do something similar, but maybe not with Legacy. And then the third node is funeral homes and memorial sites. So, if you have gone through a funeral home or a mortuary and you've purchased that package, they're going to put up um a memorial for you on their website, which will include an obituary and a guest book and stuff. And also, if you book it books um your take care of your remains through a cremation service, a lot of those have a website as well. And so, but with all of these aspects, you have to think about longevity and what is going to be perpetually preserved. So from a library perspective, we are very obsessed with preservation and stable mediums. And so if um you are publishing something in a online format only, you have to think about is this going to be preserved for 100 years. So there's these questions of you know electricity and the internet and stuff like will we even recognize the world in 100 years in terms of being so computer oriented as it is now. Um, but then there's also questions of just like in a capitalist system, um, a a funeral is a funeral home is a business. Um, legacy.com is a business. What if they go bankrupt? What if they don't support their website anymore? Will we lose all of these obituaries? So, you know, the genealogical tool ancestry, um, it has a lot of obituaries in it. And it's a tool that we use when we're looking up obituaries for our service that we provide. And there's this whole data set of obituaries that were loaded into Ancestry in like the early 2000s from a website that no longer exists. So sometimes I'll find a record to an obituary for someone that I'm looking for and then when I try to click the link, it doesn't go anywhere. And so already within the last 25 years, we've seen link rot happen with online obituaries. And so that's why we like to say a newspaper has more permanence. So from a library perspective, we are committed to preserving and providing access to our local newspapers because they're an important information source for the community. Um, in terms of the San Francisco Chronicle, we have it on microfilm from 1865 when it started through 2021, but then starting in 2021, we only have it in digital replica through a database called NewsBank. But we're committed as much as we can to always keeping that NewsBank subscription going and hopefully if something ever happened to NewsBank, we could transfer all those files over to a new platform and continue providing access. Um, but we do have other microfilm of other newspapers that we continue to get up until the current day. So we do what we can based on our constraints and and because of all that we tend to think of newspapers as more of a stable medium even though they don't they can't reach as far and wide as a website. So in terms of where you can do it in the Bay Area u we already talked about the San Francisco Chronicle. The San Francisco Examiner has a free website where you can or it's a website where you can put obituaries for free. That's also on your handout that I'll point out in a little bit. Then there's the Bay Area News Group. So that's the publisher of the Marin Independent Journal, the East Bay Times, the San Jose Mercury News, and other ones. So each one costs a little bit different, but um you can go through their website, and there's links on the handout, and you can price it out. And so like I like it says on the handout generally we recommend publishing an obituary in the place where the person spent the majority of their life or the most the local the most prominent paper of the general region. So, I had a colleague whose father just passed away in Fairfield. And so, it's kind of in the greater Bay Area, but he's looking into publishing an obituary in the local Fairfield paper kind of as an announcement to um to the community members over there who might still read the newspaper. And then, you know, the last option is just the online legacy um that we already kind of talked about. So, get ready to have your pocketbook blown away because this is not cheap. Um the the very basic print obituary for the San Francisco Chronicle starts at $299 and that doesn't even include a picture and it's less than $130 words. So when we were talking about length and if length how how length matters. Yeah, it matters a lot. Um so it can go up to four columns can can be up to 600 start at $600 and it goes on from there. Then the Bay Area News Group, the one that does, you know, indep the Marin Independent Journal, San Jose Mercury News, etc. Um, their pricing is kind of is a different model, but it also starts it's pretty high as well. And so these are all little bit of research that you'll have to do and decide. And just um and each one has an interactive uh editor on their on their web form. And so as you type the obituary or paste it in, you'll see, oh, it's going to cost this much. You can delete some lines. Oh, now the price went down. So you can really fine-tune it that way. So I'm going to go back to the handout and just point out that on the back side of the handout is where we have this section places to publish. So, uh, all this stuff that I just talked about is linked here and you can go directly to the order, um, the the order portal and you could play around there. I will say I created an account with the Marin independent journal and was playing around just to try to get some pricing and then I abandoned it cuz I don't obviously want to do my obituary yet. And then somebody from their sales department reached out pretty fast to be like, "Hey, is there anything I can help you with?" and I was like, "Yeah, I'm doing a program for the library. Can you tell me how much it costs?" And so that's kind of how I got the the figures that I was able to include. Um, but you know, it's all here. And so they're they're pretty responsive. It's a money maker for the for the local newspapers. And so that's the other thing like I'm obviously a big supporter of newspapers. I'm a magazines and newspapers librarian. And so to me, it's also like this little way that you can support the newspaper because it's like taking out a classified ad and giving them some money. And so, um, you know, maybe it shouldn't be a subsidized service, but you know, maybe it kind of helps them a little bit, too. So, feel free to put in the chat what your thoughts are. Are you going to spring for a newspaper and have it immortalized in print, or do you think you're just going to do the online version? You think I'm just going to put it in the package with my funeral package, or what are you thinking that you'll do? I'll be uh really interested to hear your perspective on it. I'm also curious if anything has changed for you through the course of this. So, I've been talking to you and we've been doing activities for about 40 minutes now. And so, did did you decide did you have anything changed in your mind of what you want to do? So, I would love to hear about that in the chat as well. So, I see some chats coming through. So, let's take a look. Oh, Angelita has a good good question. Any idea of how and where to send your obituary to a different state or another country? I think you would have to do some research on what newspapers are in that country and if they offer an obituary service. Um, we have a platform that we offer through the library called Press Reader and it has newspapers from all over the world in it. And so, um, if you email MNC at sfpl.org and ask about presser, I can give you some information. But that would be a good way to see what kind of newspapers are in different areas. And also, Legacy to me is pretty much like in the English- speakaking world, it's like anybody who has an English language obituary, you see it on Legacy. Uh, so I see ones from other countries there too, like Ireland or whatever. Um, but maybe there's local ones for different countries or maybe Europe there's some sort of legacy version for European or maybe similar for South America, but it's a good question. We'd have to just look a little bit into it. Mary says she was going to leave it up to her survivors. So yeah, just put that on them. And Marina said she's planning on doing part of her funeral package and the SF Chronicle. Go Marina. I feel the same way. Um I recently told my significant other, make sure that you publish my obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle when I die because um to me that's like the gold standard or whatever. And Sylvia says she would do their crown, too. Um, yeah. So, Rosalyn says that many families are keeping it private and only sharing with family, relatives, and close friends. And honestly, I feel like that's a really that's like really disappointing. Um, I know that we kind of view death as being a private uh situation, but you never know like the distant acquaintances that your person that you lost their lives that might have been touched. And um, just also for the public record of like these genealogy researchers in 100 years or whatever. Um, so that's kind of sad to me a little bit because like we get a lot of requests for obituaries in our department and we do everything we can to find any trace of somebody and we can't even determine that the person even died for sure. And so you I think you can't even always estimate um the thirst for information that will be out there after someone passes. Um so get a lot of good feedback. Thank you very much. And um some other comments. Um I just want to be make sure that we have time for the rest of everything else. So I'm going to keep the chat going. Please feel free and I will hopefully be able to return to it in a little bit. But I have some examples that I'm excited to share with you from just reading the paper and also doing our obituary lookup service. So, here's an example of one. So, these are all from the San Francisco Chronicle from the life tribute section. And um a lot of them will go to the database and we'll actually look at them. And Jonathan will put the links in the chat, too, so you can see what it looks like in the chronicle and how to get to it from the libraryies subscription. But this is kind of like the most basic one you can do. It's got a picture and it's this really short like about 60word snapshot of this person's life. It has the basics, you know, where they lived, where they died, when, when, where, who, you know, the family that he left behind. And then in terms of the biography or like the about, it just says, "As a teacher, poet, and translator, Nick deeply touched many lives." And then to drive the point home and to give that place where people can donate, it says, "To honor Nick's memory, a new literary word has been created in his name." And this is where you can donate the money to. And so, um, if you want to follow the links that Jonathan is putting in the chat, you'll have to have your library card number and your PIN ready. Um, but and then you'll be able to connect to the NewsBank database and see what it looks like in Sichu. So, this one here, I estimate would cost about $500 to run one time in the San Francisco Chronicle. And then, of course, it would also appear on the legacy.com website. So, here's a second obit. I'm going to click through to the database so that we can actually zoom in on it and take a look. So, here's the full page of life tributes. And here is the one we're going to look at, Margaret Sherman Zukin. So, let me zoom in here. Okay, so here she is. Uh, first of note, there's two pictures. So, there's her as a young person and her as an older person. And that's a decision you'll need to think about as well. What picture do you want to include? And if you want to do one or two, obviously, it's going to cost more to do two. But maybe that's an important, you know, thing to to illustrate the progression of life. So, it starts out straightforward enough. uh you know where she was born, how she grew up, where she went to college, how she met her husband, when they got married, where they lived, all the kids that they had. But then we get to this part that's a little bit different. So it says, "Like many young people at that time, Peggy and Joe Joe enjoyed drinking with friends at dinner parties, and that was a lot of fun until Peggy's drinking crossed the invisible line into alcoholism. Her drinking became a problem for the whole family until finally she found AA and got sober on May 29th, 1974, which opened a new chapter in her life. So, I think this is an example of content that could be the bad maybe or something that a family could be ashamed of and that would want to be left out or pushed under the rug. But in this case, as we continue to read through her obituary, we find out it's central to her life story. It caused her to become a sponsor to help all these other people through AA to become sober. Then it led to a 18-year career as a alcohol and drug counselor. And and then it goes on, you know, to describe these other things, places she liked to travel. like Chrissy said, you know, that's what is also really important to people too. And so in this case, um my question is, you know, if she had left this up to her family to write it after she passed away, would they have included this important information about her work in AA and being a drug and alcohol counselor? Or if she had did she tell them, make sure you include this, they maybe drafted up a little bit of something. So, if you have something in your life that you know maybe people will feel uncomfortable including after you die, but you feel like it's really important to your story, make sure you provide for that. Okay, so here we are back to our examples. Oh, by the way, that one I estimate that one would cost um around $1,200. probably maybe $900 to $1,200 cuz it's pretty long and it has two pictures even though it's only two columns. Okay, so for the third example, uh we I'm going to click through to this one cuz it's very long too. So I think this one might be another one of the questions of how long is too long for an obituary. So let me zoom out here. So here I'm going to talk about this one. Natalyia set and casillas. So this is four columns and each column is very long. And the thing that I want to point out is let me zoom in right away when we started. My wife Natalia set and biny casilus passed away on November 13th, 2025 after at the age of 83 after a courageous battle with heart disease. So as it goes on, this is very much told from the perspective of the widowerower, the husband that she left behind. He just has platitudes upon platitudes about her. She was my rock, my sun, my moon, my stars, my everything. Um, but then he really gives a lot of body to the life that they share together and her personality really does come out. He tells all of these stories about her being on Hollywood squares and in the opera community and blah blah and then positions it within historic events like in 2007 the iPhone burst onto the scene and changed the world. And so in this case, you know, this is another question of perspective and the voice that it's told in. So maybe she wanted her husband to write this obituary from his perspective telling his story of his life with her. But do you think he remembered all these details without her helping or prompting him? So maybe even if you want one of your survivors to write her obituary, remind them, hey, remember the time this happened? Remember this, remember that? like provide an outline or whatever and help them write this really lively, full of voice um obituary from their perspective. Now, this one I estimate will cost between $13.90 and $1,800 because it's so long, but it's still it's only four columns, but the more columns the more expensive, but the more words more expensive, so maybe even more than that. Okay. And then our last example, Jack Floyd Schaefer. Let's take a look at what that looks like in the database. So, I'm going to zoom out here. So, this one not too long. It's just this part of the page, but let me point out to you, this is from the May 29th, 2026 Chronicle. And whoops, let me zoom in. But let me point out his death was in 2020. So this is one of the longest periods in between the death and the obituary that I've ever seen. And so it kind of makes you wonder who was this being published for and to serve what end. Um but when we start reading it immediately it says it is with heavy hearts that the siblings of Jack Floyd Schaefer announce his passing. Jack died of COVID 19 at California Pacific Medical Center. And then it goes on and so um you know I think that in in this case it's sharing the basics of you know the family that he left behind and they're reminiscing about his childhood that they the childhood that they all had together, the love of um astronomy and the telescope that he passed on to them. even this joke that even they saw an occasional UFO during summer's splint at Clear Lake. And then they also make made this joke about um he had the annoying habit of cutting seized candy in half and replacing it if the filling didn't appeal to him, which was against all family candy protocol. So there's some levity and some um humor used in this. Um but then it does go on to a little bit of the darker aspect. So like Daniel had asked. So um let me read this part. Though we were estranged in the last years of his life, we remember and honor the qualities that made Jack unique. He did not have an easy life. He was a complex person with deep and diverse sensitivities for whom the vicissitudes of life presented challenges. And then it goes on to say who um he who the other people he survived by a quote from one of the siblings. And then we find out that they spread his ashes in 2022. So, it's already been even four years since they spread his ashes. So, this one is just such an interesting example to me because it's doing a lot of work. Um, I feel like it's really for the family to grieve and to and to move forward. And it's almost like they're saying, you know, to everybody out there who's lost a family member and they didn't have a perfect relationship, it's okay. feel like you can still love the person and mourn their their passing. And so that's like a really beautiful thing to share. So maybe that's something that you'll want to think of as well. And I would estimate that this one will cost about $900 to publish. All right. So those are my examples. I had no historic examples. This historic examples are pretty a little bit more boring. um they're a little bit shorter, but the the hunt for them on the microfilm can be exciting. So, kind of we're wrapping up. Um I do have a little bit to uh say about using AI to write an obituary. I don't think I'll have time unless you want to stay on after three. We can look at that a little bit. Um but I'm going to kind of do a wrap-up now and then we'll have time for some more questions and I can read some of your comments from the chat. So in a nutshell, you know, originally we think of a journalist is a person who writes an obituary for famous people, prominent people, or if you live in a small community, that newspaper might have had a journalist assigned to the obituary beat. But as time progressed now, it's something that usually a grieving relative has to take care of. And we also like to say when people are asking us to find an obituary and the death has been pretty recent. We just explained, you know, the friends and family are are mourning and it's a very difficult time for them. There's a lot to take care of and if the person who passed away isn't wasn't good about setting up their will and their estate like I'm sure you all are, then that's going to be even more stuff for the survivors to have to do. And so the the obituary might be the last thing that they think of. So maybe the new era is the era of self- authorship which is where you come in where you can ensure the accuracy of your life the voice that you want to convey and also maybe give a little bit of care to your morning family members so that they don't have to worry about it. So the first step today we did a little bit of drafting. So, we were able to do the activities where you wrote down some things. You have kind of two different audiences that you can think about and you can maybe do a little bit more drafting now that you have a more out a further outline or if you want to play around with AI to do it, you'll get a draft that way. And like I said, maybe we could take a look after I take your questions if you want to stay on a little bit later. And then you really got to secure the funds. So, we see that this is a commercial service. The newspapers are making money on this and you're going to have to make sure that you say, you know, in your will or your estate documents, I'm leaving $1,000 to publish my obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle or, you know, however you want to decide. And then whoever is the executive of your estate, you'll just want to make sure that they have those instructions from you as well and that your wishes are communicated. So, I'm going to keep the AI thing to the side for a moment. We'll come back to it. Um, but on the the handout, we also have some books that you can check out. They're available as ebooks or in print in the library. So, there's links if you clicking on the digital version of the handout. The link will take you to the library catalog and you can request it or access it. And I just want to know how confident do you feel about writing your own obituary? Do you feel good about this? Do is there more questions that you have? Um, feel free to put them in the chat or the Q&A function and we'll be talking about those for the next couple minutes till we end. And you're also welcome to contact us at the magazines and newspaper center. Um, Jonathan put the link to our obituary lookup service in the chat, but it's also linked off of our website. This is the short URL for it. And you can email us or call us. There's a reference librarian at our desk whenever the main library is open. So, thank you all so much. I'm going to stop sharing my screen just so we can go through the comments. So, some um feedback on these obituary examples. So, that's cool. Thank you for the feedback. Yeah. So, Marina pointed out that from time to time the SF Chronicle publishes obituaries that are like commemorations of a passing. So, that's possible too. It's you go to their website, it's a little bit different. It's um called a memorial. So there's a life tribute which is like an obituary and then there's like I think it's called a memorial and then that's a way that you can um yeah commemorate a milestone anniversary of a death. Oh yeah, I forgot. Thank you Jonathan for putting the funny obituary link in the chat. Um, I forgot to mention that, but when I was talking about your voice can be heard, there's this New York Times article that has funny obituaries. Um, let me just show it really quick. Let me share my screen. Hold on. Okay. So, um, you can look at this on your own. Um, you can also get the New York Times for free through the library. So, th this is ones that people wrote themselves and it was just it's full of humor. So, here's an example. Hersan Maynard croked at the age of 90 years old on August 1, August 7th, 2021. I wrote this obit and paid for it. Um, then it go I think it goes on to say, "I will be remembered for a while by my family, all whose names I am by far too cheap to list and a few friends, too." And it has a typo in it, too. So, really authentic in terms of I always like to say I don't mind typos anymore because it shows that a real person wrote it and not AI. Um, but then he goes, "I had a pretty good life and everybody dies. Bye-bye." So maybe that's like your message to the world after you die is just to inject some humor into it. So feel free to read the rest of that article. It's pretty funny. And then yeah, thanks for sharing that link, Jerry. Um there's this video. It's a documentary from the library subscription, a canopy about obits from the New York Times. So New York Times is like the gold standard of obits. you know, if you you know, you really had a good life if if the New York Times wrote writes an obituary about you because you're, you know, a prominent New Yorker or whatever. Uh, Sylvia, thank you so much for the positive feedback. And um, Anna asks, "How to identify appropriate journalists to write the document? And also, do you have memoir writing workshop?" Well, I think if you were to have a journalist write your obituary, it would be a fee for service situation where you would have to find somebody and contract them to help you. Um, maybe even like a ghost writing service. And I think that we do have memoir and other writing workshops. Um, we'll have to try to get back to you about that and answer you. They come and go and they're organized by different department and also different branch. If you have like a branch library in your neighborhood, you can ask directly to them about it cuz they do their own programming and then we do our programming at the main library. Um, and Gloria says that she thinks she's the one that can provide the true facts and feelings of my life and of my own. And so good. Gloria is empowered to write her own. Oh, thanks Sherry. you uh responded to Anna's question. There's a memoir writing workshop on the 1st of July. Perfect timing. Great. So, if your obituary feels too long, take this memoir writing workshop instead. So, you're all very welcome. Um if anybody wants to stay on, I can talk about the AI thing for a minute. And you're very welcome, Sharon. Um so, if you if you want to head out, that's totally great. Have a great rest of your day. We'll send the recording out later um probably tomorrow. But if you want to stay on, let me show you what I did playing around with AI a little bit. So, okay, we're going towards the end. Here we are. Um, so a common thing that people are doing a lot is using AI to help them draft something. And there's pros and cons to it. Um, I'm kind of very lukewarm about AI cuz it always like lets me down a little bit. But I have to say that I played around with it for this and I found it was pretty interesting. Oh, and Jonathan, if you need to go, I totally understand, too. Um, so feel free to sign off. I can do like the links and stuff, but if you do want to stay, that would be great. So, um, on our little handout here, I have a link to on.sfpl.org/right-year- obit. And this is a very long questionnaire that you can use um, and part of your prompt into the AI. And on the back side of the handout, I have some listed here, popular AI tools. So, the two that are more general that people really like for drafting text are ChatGpt and Claude, but you can also use Copilot or Gemini. The one that I used was Copilot. Then there's one that's specific to milestone events and celebrations and it's called Celebrate Ally. So, that one's um for if you need help writing a wedding speech or an obituary, you can use that one. And then if you have arranged with a funeral home for a package, then they have software packages that have a AI obit writing uh tool in them. And so you could ask about that at your um cremation or obituary service. So let me show you what I got going on over here. So this is the link um on your handout. If you click the link to the AI prompts and questionnaire, it's this. And it's very long. It is five pages including up to 142 questions. So, this could be like how long is too long? So, you can answer as little or as much of this as you want. It's adapted from this guy who actually um who actually did this AI developed the AI tool to do this and then he abandoned the project and gave me permission to adapt his questionnaire for our workshop today. And so what you can do from this page in Google Drive, you could just go to file and then make a copy and then you'll have a copy of it that you can edit and then copy and paste into your generative AI tool. So I had done it earlier. I was playing around with it and um I just went this isn't actually like the details of my life but I answered some of the questions and pretended like you know I was had lived a hundred years and now I can look back on my life and share my information. So, there was a lot that I didn't answer and there was um some that I did and then I just, you know, said, "Okay, I'm going to add whatever I want." And then I came up with this prompt to put into the tool. So, this is an example one. The one in blue is the one that I actually used. So, I told uh I told Copilot, "Write three drafts of an obituary with the answers to the questionnaire I provide below. Make one a short version no longer than 65 words. Make another a longer version 200 words in length. And make a third version 350 words in length. Do not invent details. Use a factual tone that is slightly celebratory and humorous. So you have to really give it guard rails because the AI will just go crazy sometimes with like using s um just overly exaggerated language and stuff. So that's why I said do not invent anything and use factual details. So I already did it, but I'm going to show you live uh what you could do. So almost all of them they start on the the uh co-pilot chat GBT whatever. They all kind of start like this where there's just this text box. So I'm going to put it in there. This was my prompt that I just read to you all. Now it's going to say, "Okay, I can do it. I got I got the assignment. Lay it on me. So now I'm going to go back over here and I'm just going to highlight all of this. So just wait a minute while I go through. Okay, here we are. Okay, copy that. I'm going back over to Copilot. I'm going to paste it in there. All right, it got my info. Now it's thinking hard. It's going to give me something really good. All right, check this out. Short version. Well, I won't read the whole thing to all of them to you all, but you can see there's a short version, the a medium version, and a long version. And even the long version, 350 words, that's not that long. But um for someone who's an AI skeptic, I was pleasantly surprised by this. And I think also, you know, being I'm be like half my life right now. And so, um to project like as a visioning experience almost of like what I expect to accomplish by the time I die and how long I want to live or whatever. Um and then to put it in here, it was almost it was like a weird Yeah. like like a vision board or something almost where I'm like that sounds really good. I would be really pleased if someone read about my life and found out um that you know that I was also a philosopher cuz I made up this detail that after I retired I got a PhD in philosophy and so um I don't know it's just like pretty cool to see it and um you know I could download this I could go and copy and paste it from Copilot and I think I did. Yeah. So, I have it down here in my Google Doc. And so, then I could start editing it and make it better or worse or maybe put some more of my voice and humor into it. So, that's the little AI demo. I don't know. Tell me, would you do would you use AI to write your obituary? As a writer, I'm kind of offended because I'm like, I want to write my own obituary, but it's kind of fun to fill out a questionnaire and then have it do it. Yeah, I like I like your uh skepticism uh to both of you, NP and Anna and Tommy. Yeah, you're gonna you don't want to put your personal data in it. That's really good. The the good thing is the co-pilot that I can use through my job with the city. It's locked down. It's more protected. There's things you can't do supposedly. What we put in isn't shared. But you never really want to share any of your really personal information with it. Yeah. I like I like your your all you all have some really good criticism and uh guidelines for what you would want to use AI for and what you wouldn't. Yeah. Supposedly, right? Yeah. So, I made up a lot of those details about myself. So, I wasn't really telling AI. Some of it was true, but some of it wasn't. So, all right. Thank you all so much for coming. Uh, like I said, feel free to email us or call us if you have more questions and good luck writing your obituaries. Oh, get out there and do the work. Bye. Have a great day.