Are death records public record?
I know my great grandmother died in NJ, somewhere in Bergen county (Rutherford, NJ as far as I know). She had been an immigrant from England in 1942 (approx). Every web site I seem to find for vital records in NJ wants to charge just to search. I understand that there will be a charge for a copy of the record, but aren’t vital records public record?
Some are, some are not, and just because a record is public doesn’t mean the state / county has to spend the time and money to put it on-line.
Some do; West Virginia and Missouri both have wonderful web sites with some BMD records. Some don’t. RootsWeb has data bases of death record indexes from California, Kentucky and Texas, for selected years.
If you have ever read "Day of the Jackal", you may remember how the bad guy got a birth certificate for a child that was born about the time he was but had died young and pretended it was his; he then used it to get a passport. The authorities are more wary these days, but identity thieves are more sophisticated. So, may state and counties are less eager to give out information than they used to be.
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