As a researcher and biographer, your first task is to establish basic facts about a person's life beyond what is provided in Dr. Gross's timeline entry. These facts must include:
- Place and date of birth
- Place and date of death
- Variant names (especially important for women)
- Occupation(s)
- Significant accomplishments
The best single source of this information is a newspaper obituary. Newspapers, however, did not write obituaries for all individuals. The New York Times recently addressed its historical exclusion of minorities and women from the obituary section by launching an obituary writing project called Overlooked. In fact, Overlooked published an obituary for Sissieretta Jones. Take a look!
If you search in the New York Times and Providence Journal for an obituary and come up short, the next best place to look is Wikipedia and Ancestry.com which is a tool for finding digitized vital records, like birth and death records. Look for Ancestry.com under the Vital + Government Records page of this guide.
REMEMBER: Like Dr. Gross, we are interested in an individual's connection to Rhode Island. While looking for information, seek out and pay close attention to sources that reveal something about a person's experience and accomplishments in RI.