General Reference Services

The Washington State Library is pleased to offer Ask a Librarian: instant access to a professional reference librarian via email, live chat, by telephone, or by voice-over software.  Our librarians have specialized knowledge of Washington State government, history, and genealogy and are ready to help you locate the perfect information resource to answer your question.  Historians and researchers know that not everything can be found on Google, so if your Washington-related research hits a snag, or you just want to find out where to begin, contact the Washington State Library.

Article Delivery

The Reference Staff is happy to provide desktop document delivery for articles appearing in journals in the Washington State Library collection.  First, check our online catalog to verify we have the journal and the year you are interested in.  Once you have confirmed the holdings, send us your request.  Make sure that you have as complete a citation as possible.  We will get back to you as soon as possible with the results.  Articles are usually sent as Adobe Acrobat attachments, but can also be sent via postal mail or fax.

Internet Access and Copy Services

The Reading Room at the State Library contains seven public access computer terminals.  The Microfilm area has an additional six, with priority usage for those doing genealogical research.  All of these terminals provide access to the Internet, as well as library-use only subscription databases, such as Ancestry.com, Heritage Quest, and Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps.  The public terminals do not have Microsoft Office software (Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint, etc.) or instant messaging (IM) loaded.

Printing from computer terminals as well as photocopying services are available through our copy card system.  Copies are 15 cents a page.

Genealogy Services

Obituary Lookups

We do offer free obituaries from newspapers in our collection! You can request them by sending us an email to or by visiting our website and using one of our other access types - email form, chat or by calling us.

We will ask that you request each obituary in a separate email.

Please provide us with a death date (or at least a 10-year window) and location of death or burial (so we know where to look for the obit). If it’s not enough information or if we can’t locate them, we’ll let you know.

If you don’t have an exact death date, we can try to look it up in a Washington State Death Index from the WA State Dept. of Health (for years 1907-2004). The microfilm is in 5 and 10 year batches so if an exact death date isn’t known, an estimated era is necessary. For deaths after 2004, we will search the Social Security Death Index.

For deaths prior to 1907, the counties kept records – and they’re not terribly complete but we will check for you. Visit our online index of county records for a list of availability.

While we have over 40,000 microfilm reels of Washington State newspapers, we don’t own every copy of every paper. There are some gaps in printing, coverage and preservation.

There are some obits that take us longer to find – older ones before official obituary sections in newspapers; deaths in small rural towns where there might not be a paper (or we may not have every edition of that paper); common names (too many to look for); unknown death date; and unknown location.

Information from the death indexes can be misleading. Some years of the Washington State Death Index note only the location of death but not the location of residence. And many times the location is only a county with no city specified. In the Social Security Death Index, no death location is noted, only where the last benefits were sent. All of these factors can make it harder to locate an obituary.

We do not usually mail obituaries. We scan them into an Adobe Acrobat file (most computers have the free Reader installed) and attach them to an email. The quality is good but it does depend on the quality of the microfilm we have to work with. If you prefer to receive obituaries through the mail, you can send us a letter requesting them. Our address is: Washington State Library, Public Services, 6880 Capitol Blvd. S., PO Box 42460, Olympia, WA 98504-2460.

We are able to offer this free obituary service, but only as time allows. We’ve been lucky so far that no one person has abused the system or monopolized all our time. We strive to have a prompt turn-around time, but that is not always possible. It would help streamline our process if you did not resubmit your obituary requests.  As long as you have received an automatic reply stating that we have received your request, you will get a reply from us just as soon as possible.

Depending on the research you need, you may wish to contact a free service, such as Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness or a professional (Board for Certification of Genealogists or the Association of Professional Genealogists). Other good resources include the Online Washington State death indexes list, Washington Obituary Links, and the Obituary Daily Times.