The newspaper search is very, very poor. Smith is also one of my surnames. Even with the full name and dates, it will turn up links to the old Snuffy
Smith comic strip. Same with less common names. Gadd -- I'll get links to words like gad-about.
And the other day, to give another example, I was searching for Arabelle Martin. I knew there was an obit but I had misread the day of the week and failed to save the image to my shoebox.
Even though I had the name as it appeared in the headline, month and year, I got dozens and dozens of false hits including the want ads, sports pages, etc. Finally I used her brother's name (how I originally came upon the obit) and found it again.
What I generally do is try to find a person's death date from another source, and then go to the newspaper a day or so after and search page by page.
