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Death Certificates Revive Searches For Information

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By SHARON TATE MOODY Tribune correspondent

Published: November 11, 2007

A death certificate contains valuable information about more than your ancestor's demise. Frequently, it will include information about birth, parents and spouses.

When we access materials, we determine whether the source is original or derivative, if the information is primary or secondary, and whether the evidence is direct or indirect. From this assessment, we make a judgment call on how reliable the information is.
William Lindsey Blankenship's death certificate shows he died Jan. 26, 1941, at his residence at 105 E. Third St., Rome, Ga. His cause of death was influenza/pneumonia. Dr. W.H. Lewis signed the certificate. This information is considered primary since it all relates to the death (the purpose of the certificate). It is direct, meaning we don't have to see any other materials to put with it to get a clear answer about when and where he died. What I have is a copy - not the original - of his death certificate. Since I have no reason to believe it has been altered, it is as good as the original.

The death pronouncement by a doctor and burial information by the funeral director are official and primary. Any other information on that certificate is secondary, which means you should question how accurate it is.

The informants could be very knowledgeable and their information correct. Just because it is secondary doesn't mean it isn't accurate. The problem is that we often don't know the reliability of the person or the information. Another thing to consider is that the informant in most cases will be a family member who was grieving at the time the information was given. Normally clear memories could have been clouded with emotion when he or she gave the information.

The informant on William's death certificate was his daughter. She gave her father's date of birth as July 25, 1851. His tombstone and his obituary show he was born July 25, 1862. The 1870 census shows him as 7 years old in his widowed mother's household. Certainly any discerning researcher will conclude the date of birth on the death certificate is questionable.

The death certificate also is considered primary for the place of burial since it is signed by the person doing the burial, which usually will be the funeral home director. Most researchers would not question this piece of information until they walked the cemetery without finding the grave.

But a discerning researcher at this point would investigate to see if anyone or group (such as a local genealogical society) has completed a cemetery survey for the county. These surveys, which list everyone buried in the cemetery along with the information from their tombstones, will be at the local library or historical society. The survey might reveal the missing body buried in another cemetery. Of course, the mystery of why the information was wrong or how William got to the other cemetery would still need to be answered.

In this particular case, no reliable cemetery survey has been done, but a November 2000 interview with William's only surviving daughter clarified the mystery. The death certificate was not wrong: William had been buried in the small county cemetery of Rush Chapel Church. A few years later, however, his daughters began to worry about what would happen to Papa's grave when they could no longer care for it. They had his body exhumed and reinterred at a large city cemetery tended by caretakers.

This case is illustrative of how we can't take any document at face value. We must question everything, and we must continue to search and explore until we're sure we have the whole story.

How you go about getting a death certificate varies depending on the time and location. Most states did not require death certificates until the 20th century. For ancestors who died on earlier dates, we look for substitutes such as obituaries, tombstones, church files, oral family history, wills, military pension files or other such records.

Death certificates have never been federalized. This means you will find them on a local or state level, and access to the records is controlled by individual states. No one set of rules applies for all states. A good place to learn more about states of interest to you is Cyndi's List (www.cyndis list.com/deaths.htm#States).

Some states consider death records public while others protect them by limiting access. In Alabama, for example, death certificates are confidential with restricted access for 25 years from the date of death. Records older than that can be obtained by anyone with payment of the required fee. Those within the 25-year range can be obtained by a parent, child, sibling, legal representative of the estate or the person listed as the informant on the certificate.

Connecticut death certificates are available to the general public but applicants must be older than 18. Social Security numbers for those who die after 1997 will be blocked from view before the record is copied unless the applicant is an immediate family member, the estate executor or a party on the certificate (such as the funeral director, embalmer or physician). If the death occurred after 2001, the Administrative Purposes section will be deleted. This section includes the Social Security number, occupation, race, educational level and Hispanic origin.

One final tip for searching in death records is to get them for all known siblings. The informant on your direct ancestor's death certificate might not have known the deceased's parents. This is particularly true if the informant was an in-law but never met those parents. In such cases, the death certificate of one of the siblings might identify the parents.

Getting certificates for siblings also sometimes shows they didn't all have the same mother or father, offering evidence of more than one marriage for one or both of the parents.

Tampa Society Meeting

The Florida Genealogical Society will hold its monthly meeting at 10:30 a.m. Saturday in the John F. Germany Library auditorium, 900 N. Ashley Drive, Tampa. Patricia Schultz and Pamela Treme of Pasco County will present a program titled "Cold Mailings." The presentation will address methods for using Microsoft Word, Excel and other tools to automate letters and surveys to aunts, uncles, cousins and other relatives. Admission is free.

Sharon Tate Moody is president of the Association of Professional Genealogists. Send your genealogy questions and event announcements to her in care of BayLife, The Tampa Tribune, 200 S. Parker St., Tampa FL 33606, or e-mail wmoody3@tampa

bay.rr.com. She regrets that she is unable to assist with personal research.

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