Death Records Now

trying to find info about my father side of the family and all I have to work with is his name.

There isn’t a central site. Birth records are usually kept hidden for privacy’s sake.

RootsWeb has death records for California, Kentucky, Texas & Maine, plus an SSDI:
http://searches.rootsweb.com/

The Brits have
http://www.freebmd.org.uk/

If you can see kangaroos nibbling your roses, or say "Eh" at the end of every third sentence, you are out of luck.

Your birth certificate will tell you your father’s birth state and age at the time. His SSN application will tell you his parents’ names and his exact birth date. You can get it, but
1) It costs $27
2) He has to be dead
3) He had to have had a SSN.

If your mother and he were married and you live near the town they were living in when they married, go to the library and look through the social pages for that week. You may get lucky; if they had an article there, it will be chock full of good stuff; "The groom is the son of . . .", "Best man was his brother . . .", the bride is the daughter of . . ." and so forth. It will be free, too. If they were living in Fresno but ran away to Las Vegas to get married, there still may be a snippet in the Fresno Bee.

The county clerk may let you look at the marriage record for free, if you go into the office and prove you are related. That isn’t on-line, but I thought I’d mention it.

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.