Free Obituary Maker: How to Create a Beautiful Obituary Online

A free obituary maker is an online tool that guides you through writing, formatting, and publishing a tribute for someone you've lost — with no design experience, writing background, or cost required. Most tools walk you through a series of prompts about the person's life, then generate a complete draft you can edit and share within minutes.

If you're here because someone in your life has died and you don't know where to start, you're in the right place. Writing an obituary during grief is genuinely hard. The blank page is one of the most common things funeral directors hear families struggle with. This guide explains how to use an online obituary tool effectively, what information to gather beforehand, and how to shape a draft into something that truly honors the person you've lost.

MemoriTree's free AI obituary writer is built specifically for this moment. But whether you use our tool or another, the guidance in this article applies to every free obituary maker available today.

What to Include in a Meaningful Obituary

Funeral directors advise that the most complete obituaries contain two distinct layers: the factual record and the personal portrait. Both matter, but most families focus heavily on the first and underinvest in the second.

The factual record

• Full name — including any nicknames used by family and friends
• Dates and places — birth date and birthplace, date and place of death
• Survivors — spouse or partner, children, grandchildren, siblings, and anyone else who was central to their life
• Preceded in death by — parents, siblings, or other loved ones who died before them
• Career and service — occupation, military service, volunteer work, organisations
• Memorial fund — if donations are being accepted in their name, include the charity and how to give
• Service details — visitation, funeral, burial, reception, or celebration of life information

The personal portrait

This is what separates a meaningful obituary from a legal death notice. Bereavement researchers consistently find that families who include personal details report feeling the obituary better captured who their loved one actually was. Consider including:

• One defining quality — not a list of adjectives, but the single trait that everyone who knew them would name first
• A specific memory or story — concrete, sensory, and particular to them — not a general observation
• How they made people feel — the intangible things: their humor, their warmth, the way they entered a room
• What they leaves behind — not just surviving family, but the things they built, started, taught, or passed on

For more detailed guidance on structure and length, our obituary format guide covers the full spectrum of approaches from a brief newspaper death notice to a longer life celebration tribute.

Obituary Examples for Different Situations

Reading real examples before you write is one of the most useful things you can do. Below are three short examples — each for a different style and situation — to give you a sense of what's possible.

Short obituary — newspaper announcement style

Approximately 100 words. Suitable for a brief newspaper death notice or a social media share.

Margaret "Peggy" Harlow, 81, of Portland, Oregon, passed away peacefully on March 9, 2026, surrounded by family. Born in 1944 in Bend, Oregon, Peggy spent her career as a school librarian at Lincoln Elementary for over 30 years, shaping the reading lives of thousands of children. She is survived by her husband of 55 years, Don; her daughters Claire and Ruth; and five grandchildren. A memorial service will be held on March 18 at 2:00 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church, Portland. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the Portland Public Library Foundation.

Traditional obituary — full-length tribute

Approximately 250 words. Suitable for a funeral home website, MemoriTree profile, or digital obituary platform.

James "Jim" Kowalski, 72, beloved husband, father, and retired fire captain, passed away on March 11, 2026, at home in Columbus, Ohio, following a brief illness. He was 72 years old.

Jim was born on July 4, 1953, in Cleveland, Ohio, the eldest of four children. He joined the Columbus Fire Department at 21 and served for 31 years, retiring in 2005 as Captain of Station 14. In retirement, he became a fixture at his grandchildren's baseball games, a devoted woodworker, and — in the words of his daughter Kara — "the only person in the family who actually read the instruction manual before building anything."

What those outside his family may not have known: Jim kept a logbook of every structure fire he responded to in his career — not the official incident reports, but handwritten notes on what he saw, what worked, and who showed up alongside him. He called it "the record of the people who showed up." It contains 847 entries.

Jim is survived by his wife of 48 years, Patricia; his children Kara (David) and Thomas (Melissa); and his grandchildren Noah, Lily, Owen, and Grace. He was preceded in death by his parents, Hank and Doris Kowalski, and his brother Robert.

A funeral Mass will be celebrated on March 15 at 10:00 a.m. at St. Joseph Cathedral. Burial will follow at Union Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to the Columbus Firefighters Scholarship Fund.

Celebration of life style — warm and personal

Approximately 200 words. Suitable when the family prefers a tribute that focuses on who the person was rather than the formalities of death.

Eleanor Chen, known to everyone simply as "Ellie," died on March 5, 2026, at age 67, in the San Francisco home she shared with her husband Wei for 40 years. She died as she lived: surrounded by music, good food, and the people she adored.

Ellie was a textile designer, a weekend farmer's market enthusiast, and arguably the best bad dancer in the greater Bay Area. She made friends within minutes of meeting people, remembered everyone's children's names, and sent birthday cards by postal mail — on time, every year, in her distinctive looping handwriting — to 94 people on a list she maintained in a notebook she'd had since 1989.

She is loved by Wei; her children Marcus and Diana; her grandchildren Sam, Bea, and Nico; and more friends than any one gathering can hold. A celebration of life will be announced for late April. Those who want to share a memory are invited to visit Ellie's memorial page, where the family is collecting stories, photos, and messages from the people whose lives she touched.

For dozens more fully written examples across styles and relationships, see our collection of obituary examples that beautifully capture a life.

Common Obituary Writing Mistakes to Avoid

In our experience helping families through the memorial planning process, the same patterns come up repeatedly. Here are the mistakes that most diminish an obituary — and how to avoid them.

• Writing only in generalities. Phrases like "devoted mother" and "hard worker" appear in thousands of obituaries. They are not wrong, but they do not distinguish your person from anyone else. Specificity is the difference between a tribute and a template. Instead of "devoted mother," write what she actually did: she drove three hours every month to attend every single one of his baseball games, even after her knees made it painful to climb the bleachers.
• Starting with the death instead of the life. Many obituaries open with "[Name] passed away on [date]." This is accurate, but it leads with an ending. Funeral directors often suggest opening with a detail that puts the person in motion — something they said, something they did, something that captures their particular way of being in the world.
• Omitting the informal name. If everyone called her Bea but her legal name was Beatrice, lead with Bea. People searching for the obituary will use the name they knew.
• Leaving out the memorial fund. If the family wants donations directed somewhere, include it. Many families raise meaningful amounts through obituary-linked donations — but only when the information is clear and easy to act on.
• Not linking to a digital memorial. A printed obituary or newspaper announcement is fixed and disappears. A digital memorial page gives family and friends a permanent place to return to, add photos, and share stories in the weeks and months after the service.

For a deeper walkthrough of the writing process itself, our step-by-step obituary writing guide covers each stage from first draft to final publication.

How AI Obituary Tools Have Changed the Writing Process

The biggest practical shift in obituary writing over the past few years is not the quality of the tools — it is what the tools do to the emotional experience of sitting down to write.

Grief counselors and bereavement researchers have long noted a phenomenon sometimes called "grief paralysis" — the inability to begin a task that feels too weighted with meaning. Writing an obituary is one of the tasks most commonly affected. Families know how much the tribute matters. They feel the pressure of representing a person's entire life in a few paragraphs. And so they stare at a blank page and cannot start.

An AI obituary tool solves a specific problem: it eliminates the blank page. You are no longer asked to write — you are asked to answer questions. "What did they do for work?" "Who did they leave behind?" "What's a memory that captures who they were?" The tool assembles a draft from your answers. The draft is not perfect, and it is not supposed to be. But it gives you something to react to, something to edit, something to push back against.

In our experience helping families create memorials, this shift from "write it" to "edit it" is significant. Families who feel stuck writing from scratch will often complete an obituary in under an hour when given a starting draft. The emotional weight does not disappear — but the practical barrier of the blank page does.

What AI tools cannot do is replace the knowledge you have about this particular person. The tool does not know that your father always wore the same blue sweater every Thanksgiving regardless of weather. It does not know that your mother's handwriting was so distinctive that people kept her letters. Those details have to come from you — and they are the details that matter most. The AI builds the scaffolding. You add what only you can.

For families who want guidance on the writing side — not just the tool side — our complete guide to writing an obituary for a mother, father, or other family member offers examples tailored to specific relationships.