JournalOctober 15, 2026

How to Write an Obituary for a Grandfather: A Guide With Examples

Writing your grandfather's obituary means fitting a long life into a few short paragraphs. Here is a simple way to begin, what to include, and sample wording you can adapt.

Writing an obituary for your grandfather is a strange kind of assignment. You are asked, usually within a day or two of losing him, to fit eighty or ninety years of living into four or five paragraphs. It can feel impossible, and a little unfair.

Here is the thing worth knowing before you start: an obituary is not a biography. It is a short, public notice that he has died, written with enough warmth that people who loved him recognize him in it. That is all it has to do. If it reads like him, it has done its job.

Start by gathering the facts

Most of the difficulty in writing an obituary comes from stopping mid-sentence to hunt down a date. Collect these first, in a notes app or on the back of an envelope, and the writing goes much faster:

His full name, including his middle name and any nickname people actually called him — Papa, Pop, Grandpa Joe, Bud
His age, his date of birth and birthplace, and the date he died
His parents' names, and the names of his siblings
His spouse's name, the date they married, and whether she survives him or died before him
His children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren — decide early whether to name them all or use counts, such as "twelve grandchildren"
His work, his military service if he served, his church or lodge or union
Service details: the date, time, and place of the funeral or visitation, and any memorial fund the family prefers

If you are missing something, call the family member most likely to know. Someone usually keeps the dates. It is better to ask than to guess, because obituaries are archived and read for a long time afterward.

A simple structure that works

Nearly every obituary follows the same shape, and there is no reason to reinvent it. It gives readers the information they came for and still leaves room for who he was.

The announcement. His name, age, town, and the date he died.
The early life. Where he was born, who raised him, where he grew up.
The life he built. Marriage, work, service, the decades in between.
Who he was. One short paragraph on what he loved and how he was in a room.
The family. Those who survive him and those who went before.
The service. Where and when, and where to send flowers or donations.

A short template you can fill in

If you would rather not start with a blank page, work from this. Replace the brackets and cut anything that does not apply.

[Full name], [age], of [town, state], died on [date] at [place]. He was born [date] in [place] to [parents' names].

He married [name] in [year], and they shared [number] years together. He worked as a [occupation] at [employer] for [number] years before retiring in [year]. [Sentence about military service, church, or community.]

[A sentence or two about what he loved: the garden, the shop, the lake, his team, his grandchildren's ballgames.]

He is survived by his [relationships and names]. He was preceded in death by [names].

A service will be held [date and time] at [place]. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to [organization].

A worked example

Here is the same template filled in for a fictional grandfather, so you can see how it reads when the brackets are gone.

Raymond Alan Whitfield, 87, of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, died peacefully at home on March 4, 2026, surrounded by his family. He was born June 12, 1938, in Tyrone to Walter and Ruth Whitfield, the third of five children.

Ray served four years in the United States Navy before returning home to marry Dolores Kane in 1961. They were married sixty-two years. He spent thirty-eight years as a machinist at the Bellefonte works, and was proud that he never once missed a shift for weather.

He kept a garden that fed half the street, could fix nearly anything with the right amount of patience, and sat through every one of his grandchildren's ballgames in the same folding chair, whatever the forecast. He was not a man of many words, but he showed up, which his family understood to be the same thing.

He is survived by his wife, Dolores; his children, Karen (Thomas) Mills and Daniel Whitfield; six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his son Michael and his brothers Walter and James.

A service will be held Saturday, March 9, at 11 a.m. at St. John's Lutheran Church. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the Centre County Veterans Memorial.

The detail that makes it sound like him

The template gets you a correct obituary. What makes it his is usually one small, specific thing — the folding chair, the shift he never missed, the way he answered the phone.

Grand statements tend to flatten a person. "He was a loving grandfather who will be deeply missed" is true of almost everyone, which is why it lands so softly. "He kept butterscotch candies in his coat pocket for forty years" belongs to one man only. If you can find one sentence like that, put it in. It is often the line people remember reading.

Common mistakes to avoid

Trying to include everyone. Large families make long lists. Counts are perfectly acceptable, and most newspapers charge by the line.
Leaving out his nickname. If the whole town called him Bud, "Raymond A. Whitfield" may not register. Put it in quotes or parentheses.
Listing jobs like a resume. One or two roles that mattered to him is plenty.
Writing around a difficult history. You do not have to explain an estrangement or a hard chapter. You can simply leave it out; an obituary is not an accounting.
Not reading it aloud. Read it to one other person in the family before you send it. They will catch the wrong date and the sentence that does not sound like him.

If you are writing it alone

Sometimes the task lands on one grandchild because they are "the writer in the family." If that is you, send a short text to a few relatives asking for one memory each. You will get back more than you can use, which is a much easier place to write from than an empty page.

And if you find that the words keep coming after the obituary is filed — that there is more of him than four paragraphs can hold — that is worth paying attention to. Some families go on to write a longer tribute for the service, or gather his stories somewhere the grandchildren can find them later. At Their Life Song, we help families turn those same memories into an original song written for one person, which is simply another way of keeping the folding chair and the butterscotch candies in the record. There is no hurry on any of it. The obituary is the part with a deadline; the remembering is not.