Help With Searching


The Browning Obituary search service helps you find Evansville, Indiana obituary records. Here's how it works. You tell the search service information related to the obituary record your are looking for by typing in phrases in the various search boxes. The search service responds by giving you a list of all obituary records in the database matching those phrases.  The database contains separate tables for obituary records prior to 1990 and another group of tables for obituary records after 1990.  For your convenience, the search service has three options titled Standard Search, Advanced Search, and Relative Search.  Most general searches can be accomplished quickly and easily using the Standard Search.

When should you use Advanced Search?

The Advanced Search is for very specific searches and not for general searching. Most records can be found quickly and easily using the Standard Search. However, if you need to search the obituary records on specific deceased fields or over a certain range of dates, the Advance Search facility provides this capability.  Because of the complexity of some Advanced Searches, records prior to 1990 may be excluded from Advanced Searches that attempt to pull information from fields not included in these records.

When should you use Relative Search?

The Relative Search is for searches on relative information in a given obituary record.  This allows one to primarily find obituary records after 1990 in the database .  In addition, one can significantly narrow the search for obituary records by providing a combination of deceased and relative information.  As with the Advance Search, the complexity of some Relative Searches may require several seconds to process.

Data Layout

For obituary records prior to 1990, the data in the Browning Genealogy Obituary Database is contained in a single table.  This table contains fields pulled from the notecard containing the details of a given obituary.  These fields include for the last name, first name, middle name, age, date of death, and image path.  The image path field is used to allow one to view the scanned in notecard that is layed out using the specified format .

For obituary records after 1990, the data in the Browning Genealogy Obituary Database is primarily contained in two tables.  One of these tables contains information about the deceased while the other contains information about relatives of the deceased.  Each record in the relative table is linked to a unique deceased record by means of the Deceased ID field.

Deceased Table     Relative Table
Field Name Type/Length Field Name Type/Length
Deceased ID integer Relative ID integer
First name character (30) Deceased ID integer
Middle name character (30) First name character (30)
Last name character (30) Middle name character (30)
Address character (50) Last name character (30)
City character (30) Relationship character (30)
State character (20) City character (30)
Date of death date State character (20)
Age integer Comments character (250)
Cause of death character (30)
Place of death character (50)
Minister character (40)
Church character (40)
Cemetery character (50)
Funeral Home character (30)
Veteran character (40)
Occupation character (100)
Activities character (250)
Comments character (250)