Genealogy Sources
Death Certificates
Facts Retrieved
Reading left to right, a death certificate provides the following details: date and place of death; name and surname of the deceased; their sex; their age; their occupation; their cause of death; signature, description and address of the person who informed the registrar of the death; when it was registered; and the name of the registrar.
Essential Family Tree Information
Death certificates provide an extra piece of genealogical information: age at death, which is essential if you are seeking to make a complete family tree showing dates for when each person was born and died. They are also fascinating if one of your ancestors died young and you want to know why. Apart from satisfying simple morbid curiosity; a death certificate has its practical uses, for example, as an alternative should either a birth or marriage certificate prove elusive. For instance, if you cannot find a marriage certificate for a great-grandfather, and this was preventing you from unearthing a date of birth. A search of the death indexes may lead you to find a record of a death for the name you are looking for and in the place perhaps where they grew up, giving you an age of death and hence a year of birth.