Finding Family - Death Certificates

Death Certificates can be obtained from the county in which the person died. It is the law that a death certificate must be recorded and made part of public records. If you know the county where the person died and the date that they died (as well as their name and social security number - which you can get from the social security records) you can write to the county and ask them for a copy of their death certificate. You will probably have to pay a few dollars for them to copy it for you. You do not need a certified copy of the certificate, which usually costs more than double. You just need a copy.

Once you get the copy of the death certificate, you will find the following information:

Place of death
Place of birth
Attending physician (the person who signed the death certificate)
Birth date
Name of spouse
Name of parents (if known at the time)
Date of marriage
Area last residing
Cause of death (this is being eliminated from death certificates in recent years due to privacy factors)

Once you have this information, you have more pieces to your puzzle that can be put together. The information that is put on the death certificate varies depending on the person who died and the circumstances. Not all of them carry the name of the parents. The one for my grandfather gave “unknown” for the name of his parents. So the elusive name of my great grandmother was once again elusive. The reason for this was that although the woman was still alive, my grandmother provided the coroner with the information and was never really close to my grandfather’s side of the family (they married and divorced young). She said that they called her “Mer” but that was it. She did give the last name of my great-grandmother, but not her first. Under the name of my grandfather’s father it was “unknown.” The man who supposedly left the family years ago was not found on this death certificate.

But this information did provide some very important clues. It gave the date of my grandparent’s marriage, which I already knew but can provide clues for others, it gave his birth date and the place of his birth.