How to Search for Death Certificates Online
Searching for Online Death Records
Once you know how to search for death certificates online, research on your family ancestry or your deceased loved ones last will and testament goes a lot faster. Death certificates are found in vital records archives in most states, but if you don’t live near the state capital where a certificate of death is found, finding death information online is a way to cut down on long transit, or that dreaded 4-6 weeks that mailing for the information is likely to entail.
Because of the Internet, finding death records are a lot quicker and simpler than they were 15 years ago. Many state and local governments are starting to post vital statistics online, which cuts down on traffic and calls to their home offices, freeing government record keepers to do other work.
Online record archives make life a lot easier for researchers, too. Welcome to the Information Age.
Here’s how to find a death record online.
Collect Personal Information
Learn about the person whose death certificate you want to find. You need the deceased person’s full name, their date of birth, their birthplace and the place of death. If you get all of this, looking up their death certificate tends to become easy.
You should have this information already, if you are talking about someone who died in your lifetime. If you are doing genealogical research, then you need to talk to mothers, sisters and cousins about your family history and map out a crude family tree. Consider buying a one-month membership to a genealogy website, to fill in the blank spaces in your ancestry.
Ancestry Websites
Anyone who’s search for genealogy records online has probably come across Ancestry.com, which is the most prominent ancestral website on the web. To find any useful information, though, you’ll need to pay for a membership. That comes to about $13 a month for a 1-year subscription, or $20 for a 1-month subscription.
I would recommend the 1-month option, if you plan your search to coincide with that month. If you drag your feet, you might have to carry over membership. In either case, all you have to do is add in a first name and last name of your late friend or ancestor, then match the results to your search.
You’re likely to find more than one name matching your search. Cross-reference the information for each entry, to see if one coincides with the rest of your family history information. You should be able to use process of elimination to find the dead person you’re searching for. This can help you narrow the search for the next step in obtaining a death certificate.
Search the National Archives
If you can’t find what you need at Ancestry dotcom, go to the “National Archives and Records Administration“, usually just shortened to the National Archives or NARA. NARA keeps the largest set of records in America and, even better, their information tends to be free of charge.
You’ll actually find all kinds of records at the National Archives: birth certificates, marriage documents, census records, military service records and, of course, death certificates.
NARA Vital Records
Once you get to the NARA website, type “Vital Records” into the site’s internal search engine. This should take you to a selection of choices, one of which being “Death Records” or death certificate.
Contacts the Department of Vital Statistics
In the end, if you can’t find the death certificates online that you need, you may have to call the Department of Vital Statistics for the state you’re searching in. At the least, you should be able to find the vital statistics information to make obtaining a death record from a bureaucrats as painless as possible. You might have to pay a fee and wait a short time for your death record, but online archives won’t always have everything you need, especially if you need an official death certificate.
Most of the time, an Internet search for death records should suffice, if you’ve studied how to search for death certificates online – which you have.
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This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Genealogical Records, Public Records, Vital Records. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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