A reader asks, "Grandpa died, but I don’t know the exact date or place. How do I find it?"

From the beginning genealogist to the most advanced, this question comes up each time we work on a family line. We are told to work backwards, starting from what is known. This means we begin with a death date and work towards the birth date.

Online death indexes and obituary indexes are available. One may contain the answer to when and where Grandpa or Grandma died.

The largest database is the Social Security Death Index (SSDI). It contains information on over 65 million people who died and whose death was reported to the Social Security Administration. Social Security came into existence in the late 1930s, but the death dates in the index generally begin in the 1960s.

The SSDI is online at several Internet sites. One that is updated monthly is at Rootsweb, http://ssdi.rootsweb.com/. A nice feature of this site is a link to a form letter that you mail to the Social Security Administration to order a copy of the original application. On that application, the applicant wrote his birth date and place and the names of his parents.

Death indexes for many states and counties are online. They often cover years not in the SSDI, and they include people who did not have a Social Security account. Joe Beine developed a comprehensive list of these indexes at http://home.att.net/~wee-monster/deathrecords.html.

Beine's motivation for searching out online indexes is similar to our reader's question. Beine's grandfather left his family in 1948. He traveled through Missouri, Illinois, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas and then disappeared in the mid-1950s. He is not listed in the Social Security Death Index, and it is unknown where he died. As Beine searched for death indexes, he realized they would help other researchers. His webpage is the result.

State-wide indexes that are included in Beine's listing are California 1940–1997, Idaho 1911–1951, Illinois 1916–1950, Kentucky 1911–2000, Maine 1960–1997, Michigan 1867–1882, Minnesota 1908–1996, New Mexico 1899–1940, Ohio 1913–1937, Tennessee 1908–1912 and 1914–1925, Texas 1964–1998, and 1853–1896. There are a number of county and city indexes also. Ancestry.com, a "for fee" database, has a number of other death indexes, including the Washington Death Index, 1940–1996, and the Oregon Death Index, 1903–1998.

If you are interested in other helpful articles, go to my Columns page.

© 2000–2009

Connie Lenzen, CG^SM

CG, Certified Genealogist, is a service mark of the Board for Certification of Genealogists, used under license by board certified genealogists after periodic evaluation, and the board name is registered in the US Patent & Trademark Office.