Are there lists of the victims of the Flu Epidemic of 1918?

Dear Mr. Schaffer,

Thank you for posting your request on History Hub!

According to the CDC,  the number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States. It is estimated that about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. We are unaware of any single list of all the persons that died or who were infected. As is pointed out by the NPR article  The 1918 Flu Pandemic Was Brutal, Killing More Than 50 Million People Worldwide, "In 1918, death certificate recording and epidemiology was really in its infancy… We didn't have all of that data. And there were many parts of the world that were not connected to other parts of the world. So you weren't able to get data from some of the resource-poor areas that existed at that time."

The records, if any, that were created by public health authorities varied greatly by location. If you are studying a specific locality within the United States, you may wish to contact the relevant state, county, and municipal archives and public health departments to inquire about their holdings. Also, you may wish to review back issues of local newspapers, as these sometimes posted information about individual illnesses and deaths. Some examples are described in the recent Washington Post article ‘Mr. Homer McAmis is real sick’: In 1918, newspapers listed flu victims by name.

For some locales, studies have been complied by entering data from death certificates.  For example, see the report Alaska Facts and Figures 1918 Pandemic Influenza Mortality in Alaska. However the reports on these studies generally focus on statistics rather than individual names.

Finally, there is a partial and unofficial list of notable cases on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Spanish_flu_cases.

We hope this information is helpful.  Best of luck with your research!

Another resources that might be useful is the following:  http://www.influenzaarchive.org/about.html

It is still in its infancy stages, but BYU has launched a project to identify victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic using the FamilySearch platform: https://fhtl.byu.edu/pandemic/