A text  parser basically takes a continuous flow of text-based input
and breaks it down or extracts it into various pieces. The key to
that extraction is having recognizable (and consistent) delimiters or
patterns.

I think the biggest problem you'd have would be whether or not various
obituaries have a consistent enough pattern to extract the data,
especially across various publications. You could certainly look for
key phrases like "passed away" or "born" or "survived by" to parse the
data into pieces, then parse those apart with other delimiters. For
example, once you found "survived by", a semi-colon could be used to
delimit between each type of survivor, as in: