If a tree falls ...
*
*
*
A few days ago I posted a piece with a new look at the Legacy.com database of online obituaries. In it I looked at the occurrence of the terms “rare” and “aggressive” over the pre and post pandemic years. Towards the end of the post, I commented on the rise in the use of those terms being even more damning since it appeared that the total number of obituaries per year was declining. As I wrote that, something didn’t seem right. It bothered me. I had written my first post ever about this database back in February of this year. At that time, I had taken meticulous notes on the numbers in various categories. One such statistic I logged in February was the total number of obituaries per year from 2015 to 2023. As I compared those numbers to the ones I find today I was shocked.
NEARLY TWO MILLION DEATHS HAD SIMPLY DISAPPEARED.
*
Here are the numbers I recorded in February:
2015 … 2,637,287
2016 … 2,544,422
2017 … 2,412,606
2018 … 2,213,909
2019 … 1,919,667
2020 … 2,071,903
2021 … 2,656,094
2022 … 2,440,530
2023 … 2,425,280
*
And here is how they appear today:
2015 … 2,637,857
2016 … 2,544,971
2017 … 2,417,465
2018 … 2,216,731
2019 … 1,990,761
2020 … 1,833,126
2021 … 2,116,552
2022 … 1,895,942
2023 … 1,877,571
*
Let that sink in.
Look at the figures just for 2021 and 2022.
HALF A MILLION DEATHS IN EACH YEAR WERE ERASED.
*
*
*
I truly wish that I would have had the foresight to screenshot every bit of data I was reporting back in February, but I simply did not contemplate the possibility of this sort of brazen rewriting of history. I should have known better.
I did however record at least one fragment that bears this out. Here are my screenshots used in my first post regarding July 2020 versus July 2021:
Here is how that looks today:
It is my belief that somebody did not like the “the world’s largest obituary database” showing the evidence of the wave of death caused by a certain experimental medical procedure. The decision was made to scrub the critical timeframes of the incriminating data. Post injection dates had deaths removed or relocated back to pre-pandemic years. My data shows this clearly.
*
The tree has fallen.
*
Does anybody care?
*
*
*
* I do not have paid subscriptions. But if you want to help me out, please consider contributing to a crowd fund I have to pay for a FOIA (public records request). Thank you.
Thanks for reading csofand’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
People who had a relative die, will they still be able to find the obituary?
At the end of 2021 I was doing an obituary scraping project with this website. My data storage was very limited, so I focused just on Texas.
My analysis was on age of death. With the assumption that an increase in deaths in younger populations would be a signal.
I scraped only date of birth, and date of death to get ages.
The text of the obits almost never include cause of death, so I did not analyze that.
I gave up on this project after about 4 months because it seemed there were a lot of fake obituaries. I saw obituaries for cats and dogs, as well as obituaries that looked like disturbing pranks.
I don't get the feeling that these fake obits only started since the pandemic, and there is no way there were millions of them.
I am interested in learning your methodology.