Death Records Now

I am trying to find out if a person has died in Michigan.

It depends on the year, but Michigan does release a death index. Here’s a link to it: http://www.mdch.state.mi.us/pha/osr/gendisx/search2.htm

The only caveat is that records from the City of Detroit are often missing. If that’s your situation, the only hope is the SSDI, but a lot of people are missing from it. It also doesn’t include many records pre-1984 and none pre-1960
http://ssdi.rootsweb.ancestry.com/

His name is Allan or Allen Shirley. I’m not for sure on the correct spelling. He died in 1985. I’m doing this for my mother so alot of help would be appreciated!
WITHOUT PAYING MONEY! because we all know it’s tight right now!

RootsWeb has a death record data base for California 1940 – 1995. They don’t have one for every state and they don’t have anything later or earlier for California.

http://vitals.rootsweb.com/ca/death/search.cgi

SHIRLEY, ALLEN
B. 02/14/1934 in COLORADO
Mother’s maiden name: MANQUIS
D. LOS ANGELES(19) 04/08/1985
[I don’t know what "(19)" means]

The corresponding SSDI says his LR was El Monte.

That is a death RECORD, not a death Certificate. The Certificate will tell you his mother’s full name and his father’s full name, if the person who supplied the data knew. His SSN application is $27, but he filled it out. 30% of the death certificates I see say "Unknown" for parents. 99% of the SSN applications I see have both parents filled in.

You would have to drive to the county library branch in El Monte, or send them a request and a check, to get the obituary. He was almost certainly not in the LA Times, unless he was famous or infamous. He may have been in the El Monte (News / Herald / Sun / Star) – whatever the local paper is there.

I’m doing genealogy and I’m looking for information on my grandfather. He immigrated from Mexico and I can’t find him. I know when he passed away and where but am running into a road block. Can anyone help?
I’m not looking for the certificate itself. I’m more or less looking for the information that is found on it like the SSDI database. I was just wondering if there is any sites that would tell me information like that but involving birth instead of death. For instance, place of birth and mother and father.
Particularly, I’m looking for anything on my grandpa’s birthplace and parents. His name was Frank Hernandez. Born in 1897 and died in December 1978 in South Dakota.

http://vitals.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ca/death/search.cgi
has "9,366,786 records from 1940 thru 1997". It is for California. There are other sites like that; certain states, certain time periods. There isn’t a nation-wide data base of all deaths.

http://ssdi.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/ssdi.cgi
is nation-wide but not everyone is on it.

www.findagrave.com has 22 million entries.

Hunt around. Google "Death index Utah" or "Death Index Idaho".

Note that almost no site has the certificate; you have to write away (and pay for) that