Death Records Now

I have gone to several different sites but they all end up asking for money. I thought death records were public records and anyone should be able to search for a loved one but I’m hitting dead ends everywhere.

I put some links below. I wanted to deal with a common misconception first.

> I thought death records were public records

They are, and if you send the name and death date to the appropriate county courthouse, plus a check, which may be as little as $5 or as much as $35, you can get a copy. There isn’t any law that says a state or county has to spend tax money on a web site to make death records available for free.

By contrast, some records are NOT public; sealed adoptions records, and agreements hashed out between two parties in a civil lawsuit, for instance. You cannot get them no matter how much you pay.

Below:

These are all free. Some have ads at the top, which sometimes ask for a name and take you to a pay site, so be careful to distinguish between the advertisement and the input form. An index will have name, date and maybe something else; death records – 500 KB jpg’s of death certificates – are rare. Some of these say "Records" – I copied the page title – but are really indexes.

Social Security Death Index
http://ssdi.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/ssdi.cgi
1960ish – now; almost 90 million entries in November 2010.

Find-a-Grave
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi
53 million entries in November 2010, mostly the USA. Entries range; they may have one or more of:
Exact birth and death dates
A short biography/obituary
Links to the person’s parents’ graves and/or and children’s graves
Picture(s) of the person
The best ones have all of the above; the worst ones have just a name and year of death; "J. Smith, b. ????, d. 1912".

Arizona genealogy
http://genealogy.az.gov/
Births 1855 – 1934; deaths 1844 – 1959. Real records, not an index. Number of entries not given.

California Death index
http://vitals.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ca/death/search.cgi
9,366,786 entries from 1940 – 1997

Kentucky Death Records
(Y!A only allows 10 links per answer, so I cheated. Change the "/ca/" in the URL for the California Death index to "/ky/" to get Kentucky.)
2,921,383 entries from 1911 – 2000

Maine Death Records
Change the "/ca/" in the URL for the California Death index to "/me/" to get Maine.)
401,960 entries from 1960 – 1997

Missouri Digital Archives
http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/deathcertificates/
Real records; Year range 1910 – "50 years ago", so the upper limit changes by one every year. Number of entries not stated, but it too would grow over time. Not all counties are here.

Texas Death Records
Change the "/ca/" in the URL for the California Death index to "/tx".)
3,963,456 entries from 1964 – 1998

West Virginia Birth, Death and Marriage records
http://www.wvculture.org/vrr/va_select.aspx
Real records; number of entries not stated. Years vary by county. Here are the first five counties, to give you a feel for it:

Barbour: 1853 – 1859, 1861 – 1969
Berkeley: 1871, 1875 – 1906, 1917 – 1970
Boone: 1865 – 1873, 1877 – 1883, 1885 – 1968
Braxton: 1853 – 1861, 1865, 1867 – 1969
Brooke: 1853 – 1860, 1862, 1865, 1867 – 1868, 1874 – 1880, 1885 – 1970

I have been researching ancestry and one man managed to immigrate to America in the early 1800s without leaving any records. No immigration records exist with his name. Also, he married a woman with an unknown last name in America in 1824 when he was 20 years old. I know that because their first child was born shortly after their marriage in Pennsylvania. I am lead to believe that he must have been a criminal or was forced to leave Scotland (my father told me that his father said that we came over here because somebody didn’t pay their taxes). He left a small town called Leadhills Scotland, and none of his family followed him. Was this guy a criminal, or was record-keeping just not as precise as it is in more current times?

Any ideas would be helpful as this is irritating me to death.

Thank you
I don’t know if this is of any help, but the man is named Joseph E. Kerr.

Also, his wife Mary (?) was born on a ship c. 1805. No marriage records exist.

http://www.maxwellancestry.com/ancestry/resources/prisonsearch.aspx a free Scotlish border prison search

http://familytimeline.webs.com/apps/links/ I was looking at a link from this website about transported UK convicts yesterday and found lots of information, several took ailas’s so if he did thn he could be using a different name, also look at the Old Baily link as he may have been sent to London to face trial ( and you hope he was as there is full free searchable records)… http://www.genuki.org.uk/cgi-bin/htsearch?words=1823+transported+convicts&method=and&format=builtin-short&matchesperpage=20&sort=score&config=genuki&restrict=&exclude=&restrict_header=&backlink_header=
Also there are marriages and births registered onboard…you may find he never married rather than it was not recorded and just target searching’ "Joseph Kerr" scotland’ you may find further information…..you hope he was a convict as a convict is worse than a prisoner and at that time in history he would have been transported and records are easier to get if your ancestors are rich or rogues ( more records)

There are also some Kerr’s on these websites http://www.johnmacmillan.co.uk/cemeteries/dum_mouswald.html
http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cdobie/sanquhar.htm

Add: look on the links page I gave you ( familytimeline’s) under general FH resources at ‘Black sheep ancestry’

For example, I am trying to locate a childhood friend here in California whom I haven’t seen in almost 20 years. I went to a couple of those online "people finding" sites…and sure enough, they say they can provide me with all kinds of current information about her…marriage, divorce, death, etc. etc. For a large fee they can they can provide all kinds of information "from the public record". But yet, when I go to the county records office and try to obtain the exact same information…I am denied access because this information is only given to "immediate family members."

This perplexes me. Can anyone explain this?

Official town and city hall records can be quite difficult to obtain. But the newspaper information (Births, obituaries, marriages, etc.) can be found by anyone willing to sift through it.