Death Records Now

This person died in Oakland, Ca, in 2005. I have date of birth, death and full name and want to find the details of his death (by natural causes) and particularly the location of his ashes. I want to use public records and not a paid service.

You can write to the Alameda County Clerk-Recorder and buy an informational copy of his death certificate:
http://www.acgov.org/auditor/clerk/death3b.htm

"Public" doesn’t mean "free"; it just means "Available". By contrast, most adoption records and the details of some civil suits are "sealed". That means you cannot buy copies no matter what.

It is $14, something they hide on a different page,
http://www.acgov.org/auditor/clerk/vitalrecords.htm

for their own convenience. Government web designers don’t have to think of the public’s convenience.

Even then the death certificate may not reveal where his ashes are; they may have given them to the family, and the family may have scattered them somewhere illegally.

It is illegal to walk through a wilderness area, for instance, a place the deceased spent many a happy hour backpacking, and scatter his ashes here and there, paying particular attention to patches of lupine. My son has promised to do that for me, and fiddle dee dee to the USFS.

birth cert, death records, back ground checks, adoption records, etc? I’m trying to locate my nationality and where my family originated from and also trying to find my husbands real father as he was adopted. please help..I’m afraid to pay for the sites on here because a lot of them are scams or have no information in them…thanks for all of your answers…

I would recommend http://www.crimcheck.com, they offer exactly what you’re looking for, an extensive public records database… for free! Good luck!

Or low costs?

Great grandfather Charles Lewis (also spelled Chas Louis) Whyte (b.17 Oct 1875 Princeton, IL? and d.5 Feb 1932 Mankato, MN) was adopted by Ananias and Sarah Whyte possibly in Bureau County, IL, date unknown. 1880 census shows them living in Iowa and that Chas was an adopted son. This is a complete dead end for me!

I have copies of some of the censuses from 1800 through 1930 for him, unable to find his whereabouts in 1890 & 1895, and I have a copy of his 1918 WW1 registration card. He worked as a switchman and/or conductor for the railroad in Mankato, MN, and his death certificate lists his parents as unknown and that the RR claimed his body for burial arrangements.

Any help greatly appreciated!!! We are having a family reunion in three months and I’d like to get past this obstacle before then!
I have census records from 1880, not 1800, LOL, he was supposedly born in 1875.

Thanks for any help!
More info: Charles’ dad Ananias died in 1886 in Creston IA, his mother Sarah (nee Penn) died in 1881 in IA. I do have a picture, not a good one, of Charles with one of his brothers and two sisters and all their families. There, to me, does not appear to be any family resemblances. My grandmother is in the picture as a small child.
My grandmother, now 94, recalled her uncle Daniel Whyte b.1860 in PA, d.1928 Denver CO, telling a story of how Ananias just brought Charles home one day like a puppy as a toddler. My Gram thinks she was about 7 when she heard that one. I have been unable to contact any other of the Whyte descendants. Charles was a child when his parents passed away, just 6 with his mother and 11 with his father. I can not find where he went after that, if with a sibling or back onto the streets of IA. The missing censuses are 1890, 1895 and 1900. I do believe I found Charles Whyte with his wife Ella b.1880 in WI (nee Garlick) residing in a Minneapolis boarding house in 1900 but my grandmother swears they never lived there, I do think it may have been them though.
I’m hopeful to make contact with Ananias’s descendants, as I believe the rest them had resided in CO do to the death records I have been able to locate and what family stories I’m able to dig up. I also live in Denver so there might be a chance…but I wonder how willing they would be to speak of this to a complete stranger!
Charles and his wife Ella, my great grandparents, were unable to have children early on and I did find evidence of them adopting at least their first child of 4 while living in MN.

Thanks for the links, I did check with the orphan train sites with no luck. It was doubtful that Charles was a grandson to Ananias and Sarah, as like I early mentioned, there appeared to me to be no family resemblance.
I just looked at the image of the 1880 census for Dodge Township, IA, it does show on it Charles listed as "adopted son" born in IL.

Records as we would know them didn’t exist back then. No court petitions, no severing of parental rights, no social service agencies doing home visits…nada.

He could have been a local child, but just as possibly he could have been one of the children from the orphan trains. See if this helps you…

http://www.orphantrainriders.com/