GENEALOGYBITSANDPIECES-L Archives

From: "Sally Rolls Pavia" <>
Subject: [GENEALOGYBITSANDPIECES] death certificates
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 07:47:41 -0700

These tips come from the Rootsweb Review this week.

A death certificate is not primary proof for a decedent's birth or parentage
so seek confirming documents. Remember items “recorded” at the time of the
death, such as the date and cause, are primary sources, but those “reported”
later by an informant are secondary.

To determine the veracity of the reported items, identify the informant. The
closer the familial relationship, the more likely the accuracy.

If parentage is not identified, cross reference with a sibling.

If a female informant's surname differs from the decedent’s, she may be a
married daughter.
Adoptive parents can be erroneously indicated as birth parents.

Cross reference causes of death with current terms. Shaking palsy, for
example, may indicate Parkinson's disease. (See RootsWeb's Medical Genealogy
Mailing List for tips.)

Burials may be recorded by a town name, and not a cemetery, and since town
names change, do your homework.
When ordering death certificates, you can save time by using a service, but
you can save money by ordering directly from a registrar.

Some states centralize ordering at the state level and others at the
locality where the death occurred. If a county name changed, verify before
sending money to the wrong location, as refunds may not be issued.

Collect certificates as soon as possible, as costs are increasing and
privacy laws may affect your right to order.
Some excellent sources for finding death records and information are:

1. RootsWeb's Death Records Database. This has a variety of search options,
and readers are welcome to contribute their research via a text file or
Excel database.

2. Ancestry.com at www.Ancestry.com, a subscription service with multiple
indexes to death records and some original death certificates.

3. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), which has a free
pilot website and their main web site. The pilot includes original,
digitized records, while the main site has links to family trees and records
stored at family history centers around the country.

4. England and Wales's Free BMD (Birth/Marriage/Death) database, which is
part of the FreeUKGen family. This database includes an index to many of the
death records kept by the English and Welsh governments since 1837.

5. Search engines or Google Books.

This thread:

• [GENEALOGYBITSANDPIECES] death certificates by "Sally Rolls Pavia" <>