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Where can I search for death records for FREE?

July 10th, 2011 6 comments

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