We recently passed an exciting milestone on The Obit Report – we posted our 1,000th story.

On The Obit Report, we share stories of the fascinating lives we read about every day here at Legacy.com – both celebrities we miss, and regular folks we wish we could have known. When we write about celebrities, we focus on the stars that we – and our readers – love the most. So it’s totally fitting that our 1,000th post was a memory of one of the most iconic TV stars of the 1980s, Sherman Hemsley (a.k.a. George Jefferson).

The stories of funny people like Hemsley are always among our most popular. One of our all-time most-read stories is “Harvey Korman Cracks Us Up” – and oh, did he ever. Likewise Don Knotts, Gilda Radner, and Dick York. Singing stars are big winners on The Obit Report too, like Roger Miller, Tammy Wynette, and Donna Summer. And folks love to look at the photo galleries we create – particularly a collection of photos of John F. Kennedy Jr. that we recently assembled.

But we don’t just write The Obit Report for the laughs and the pictures. Some of the most important stories we share are the ones that break our hearts. And it’s gratifying to see a story of one young person, who our readers have probably never heard of, become our most-read story of all time. When Spencer Seupel took his own life, his mother wrote a frank and devastating obituary about the alcohol abuse that led to his suicide. When we learn that tens of thousands of readers have viewed a story like this one – or like the tales of Tripp Roth, who was born with Junctional Epidermolysis Bullosa, or 12-year-old Jessica Rees, who blogged about her brain tumor and urged her readers to Never Ever Give Up – it gives us hope that we’ve raised awareness and maybe even saved a life.

Since we featured Edward Gorey for our very first story on The Obit Report in April 2010, we have enjoyed bringing you the stories of people who inspire us, warm our hearts, make us cry, and make us laugh. We look forward to writing the next 1,000 stories.