I've been using death records as a primary source of info for a long time. However, recently, as I've tried to pinpoint/verify who the parents are, I've pulled up death records as provided by Ancestry and found that items such as parents were grossly wrong, even on fairly recent records. I had 3 records from 3 siblings that I had personal knowledge of and they listed the parents as 3 different sets of people. When I contacted the State health Dept, they informed me that death certificate info has never been provided to the sources I quoted from Ancestry. I then noticed what seems to be a contradiction in Ancestry's fine print that says only a couple of the items displayed is from the death certificate. So if that is true, where does the other data, such as parents, come from?
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Possibly from Indexes that the state has made available. A lot of states do NOT make death certificates publicly available. You have to order them.
You really need to order copies of the actual death certificates to see the parents listed. Also death certificates can be unreliable as sources of the parents. The information is sometimes being given by people who have forgotten or never knew.
A marriage certificate is better as the information is being directly provided by the bride and groom.
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To All Pennsylvania Death Certificates asks the "informant" to answer the questions about the deceased, NOT THE INFORMANT, when pertaining to a maiden name and name of father. Stress or language barriers and lack of clairty on behalf of the person asking the questions cause some people, especially a man answering for his deceased wife will not be caught. This would be noticed for a woman answering for a husband because a man does'nt have a maiden name. I have seen this once before but now I seen this on my grandmother's death certificate. My grandfather gave his father's name as my grandmother's father's name and gave my grandmother's maiden name instead of my grandmother's mother's maiden name. Will
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Yes quite a common problem. The person answering either didn't know for sure or was simply distressed and got confused. Errors are even more common when the parent(s) of the deceased died very young themselves.
My great-grandfather's death certificate lists his aunt (his mother's youngest sister) as his mother. His mother had died when he was less than a year old. The aunt would have been far to young to be his mother. His marriage record lists the correct mother (there are also probate records). However his son (the informant) could easily have gotten confused.
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The point I was making wasn't about whether death certificate data was accurate or not. I see that about all records. My point was that Ancestry was listing parents as death record data and wasn't even consistent within family groups. Since death certificate data is a State Health Dept function (at least in Alabama), I went to them to get a copy and they advised me that they had never supplied Ancestry that data. Since I'm paying Ancestry for access to data and they claim it to be Alabama Death data, it should be from a reliable source, albeit not perfect. It's not even death certificate information. It seems like it may be more data mining from members rather than accurate data which means they're misrepresenting the data that we're all using. I find that extremely disconcerting as I use death records a lot even though I don't support our local State Health Dept which wants $25 per attempt to get one.
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I used to work in the State of Tennessee vital records office. The person issuing a death certificate has a record of who got death certificates. However, a data file is also created from the records. The data file is usually available for sale and is supplied to the SSA, CDC, and other entities. The person you spoke to may not have been aware of the file or its distribution.
Errors were probably created by the state who created the file.
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This would be a great message to send to ancestry support for more answers.
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Death certificates contain numerous errors. Whatever information that was provided by the informant is only as accurate as the informant's knowledge of the deceased. Sometimes their knowledge of the deceased and the parents was just incorrect, vague or they misunderstood the questions. I've seen death certificates that list the informant's parents, the deceased's spouse's parents and even the deceased and the spouse as the parents of the deceased. John is usually the default guess as to the father's name. To overcome this problem I suggest trying to find the death certificates of any siblings of the deceased. The more you can find the more sure you can be of the names of the parents.
I've also seen numerous death certificates that list the birth date the same as the date of death even though the persons were married and listed as say 70, 80 and 90 years old. Generally speaking the most accurate information on a death certificate will be the place and date of death, then the cause of death followed by the place and date of burial. From there it goes down hill.
In Ancestry's database of Pennsylvania state death certificates, you may want to check the images before and after the death certificate of the person you are interested in. Sometimes corrections or an additional death certificate was added to the original, but Ancestry has not indexed them. Also be sure to look at the certificate yourself as there are a mountain of errors in Ancestry's indexing and transcribing of Pennsylvania state death certificates.
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