Using death certificates to continue your research

In the previous blog entry we used information from our birth certificate to begin our family tree.   In my personal case, I am able to get birth certificates for myself and for my parents before I hit the year 1900 before which most states did not use this form of registration.  From the three birth certificates I am able to create a family tree that looks like this:

Notice that all of my grandparents were born prior to 1900.  One of my grandparents (George W. Miller) filed a "delayed birth certificate" (see previous blog entry) in 1942, but the remaining three grandparents did not do so.  As a result we need a different kind of document to extend our tree back another generation, so in this blog entry we'll take a look at death certificates.

To get a copy of a death certificate we need to know the name of the person and the date and place where they died.  I am very fortunate to have actually known all of my grandparents, and, as a result, I know when each of them died.  If this isn't true for you, you might be able to get the needed information in one of the following ways:

1. Ask your own parents when their parents died.  The death of a parent is traumatic enough that most people will remember the details of the event.
2. If there is a cemetery where members of your family are typically buried, visit the cemetery to attempt to find the grave of your ancestor. Frequently (but not always) the sexton of the cemetery (the record keeper) will have a list of all of the people buried in the cemetery along with a notation of where in the cemetery they are buried.  From either the sexton's entry or from the person's tombstone, you might be able to get the date of death.  (I will devote an entire blog entry in the future to the pros and cons of looking at cemeteries.)
3. In today's world, there is a very handy free web site called FindAGrave.com where you can enter a person's name and possibly locate the person's grave.  Here, and in almost all of the other research you will do, the more unusual the name of your ancestor, the easier it will be to find.  For example, at FindAGrave.com there are currently 2122 George W. Millers in their database, but there is only one Harry C. Ostegren.
4. If the person died in era of Social Security and if they claimed the death benefit that is available from Social Security, they will be listed in a database called the Social Security Death Index (SSDI).  SSDI will tell you when the person died and the location to which the death benefit was sent.  Normally but not always the location is the same as the place where the person died.  A free online version of this database is available from the Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints web site:  https://familysearch.org/search/collection/1202535.
5. Finally, if all else fails, you can take an educated guess at the information.  For example, my grandfather George W. Miller was born in 1888.  I know that most people die when they are somewhere between 70 and 85.  The fact that my father was born in Colorado means that my grandfather was at least living in Colorado in 1916.  So my guess would be that my grandfather died in Colorado somewhere between 1958 and 1973.  (In reality he died in Colorado in 1960.)

With the name and the date and place of the person's death in hand, you are set to order a copy of their death certificate.  Death certificates are usually maintained by the health department or the bureau of statistics in each state.  Just like birth certificates, the process of ordering a death certificate will vary from state to state.  To find out where to start use Google to search for "death certificates in xxxx" -- where xxxx is the name of the state in question.  Once again there will be a fee for the death certificate.  And once again there are privacy rules in some states that regulate who is entitled to get a copy of a death certificate.  You SHOULD always be able to get a copy of the death certificate for your own grandparents.

After waiting one or two weeks since placing your order, the death certificate will arrive in your mailbox!  (How exciting!)  A typical death certificate looks like this:

What new information can we get from this death certificate?  First a word of caution.  You can safely assume that some of the information on the death is absolutely correct.  For example, the date of death, place of death and cause of death will most likely be correct because they are recorded at the time of the event.  The remaining information should be viewed keeping in mind the credibility of the informant.  The informant (the person who provided the remaining information) might know the dead person really well and all of their information might be accurate.  But the informant may just THINK they know the dead person really well and some of the information might be wrong.  Or the informant may realize that they didn't really know the person well and they might just guess at the missing information or not provide it at all.  I have some death certificates in which even the dead person's spouse didn't know things like the name of the dead person's parents.  So the moral of the story is that you should use the informant's information as SUGGESTIONS of the facts and they try to corroborate the information with other sources.

In the example death certificate I attached to this blog entry, I believe that my mother (the informant) provided accurate information about her father.  So from the death certificate we see the date of death, place of death and cause of death.  We see the place of birth and the year of birth along with the names of the dead person's parents.   We also see the street address where the dead person lived and the "usual occupation" of the dead person.  Finally, we see the name and location of the cemetery where the person was buried and the date of burial.

One of the things that I personally like to track is the cause of death for the person.  I do this partly because I want to know if there are genetic tendencies toward a particular illness in my family.  In the case of my grandfather, we see that he died of metastatic squamous cell carcinoma.  If you Google this disease, you find that it is skin cancer that spread through his body.  But if you do a little more reading you find that this is not the type of skin cancer that is normally considered deadly.  Squamous cell carcinoma is normally treated easily by surgically removing it.  The more dangerous type of skin cancer is called melanoma.  If you notice, my grandfather spent his early life as a farmer and the idea that a farmer would develop skin cancer later in life is not unexpected.  So why did he die of squamous cell carcinoma?  I'll never know for certain, but one of the things I remember from knowing him was that over the years he had a number of skin cancers removed from his body...especially his face and ears.  I personally think that, at the age of 85, he had had enough surgeries and that he basically "gave up" and let the later ones go untreated.  But that is only my theory and no one can prove it one way or the other.

So death certificates can provide a way of extending your tree.  But once again, most states didn't routinely use death certificates until about 1900.  However if you think about it, if the average person dies at age 70, then death certificates might let you extend your tree back to people who were born in 1830.