27 Key Facts to Extract from a Death Certificate

Last year I paid for a copy of my grandfather's 1992 Bronx, NY, death certificate because my brother, my first cousins and I wanted to be sure of his cause of death for our own health records.

When it arrived I was surprised and disappointed that it did not include his cause of death.

My grandfather's death certificate.

I had seen many New York City death certificates while doing research at the New York City Municipal Archives, but they were from decades earlier. I don't know if my grandpa's certificate was abbreviated because he died less than 25 years ago, or if that is what the Bronx death certificate form looked like in 1992.

So I've gone through my records and compared death records from four decades—three certificates from the Bronx and one from Warren, Ohio, near Youngstown.

The following table compares the 27 pieces of information found in different years. These certificates can be an amazing find if you didn't already know every little fact.

1925 Bronx, NY	1940 Bronx, NY	1970 Warren, OH	1992 Bronx, NY
Full name, sex and age	Full name, sex and age	Full name, sex and age	Full name, sex and age
Race	Race	Race
Place of death and characterization of place (e.g., hospital, hotel)	Place of death and if it’s a hospital or institution	Place of death and if it’s a hospital or institution	Place of death; if in a hospital, date of admission
Date of death	Date of death	Date of death	Date of death
		Time of death	Time of death
Attending physician and dates tending to the deceased	Attending physician and dates tending to the deceased	Attending physician and dates tending to the deceased	Attending physician and dates tending to the deceased
Primary and secondary cause of death	Primary and secondary cause of death	Primary and secondary cause of death
Last residence	Last residence	Last residence	Last residence
Marital status	Marital status	Marital status	Marital status
	Name of surviving spouse	Name of surviving spouse (maiden name if wife)	Name of surviving spouse (maiden name if wife)
Date of birth	Date of birth	Date of birth	Date of birth
		Social Security Number	Social Security Number
Occupation	Occupation	Occupation	Occupation
		Whether served in armed forces	Whether served in armed forces
	Date last worked at occupation
Birthplace	Birthplace	Birthplace	Birthplace
		Citizen of what country
How long in U.S. if foreign born	How long in U.S. if foreign born
How long resident in City of New York	How long resident in City of New York
			Level of education
Parents' names	Parents' names	Parents' names	Parents' names
Parents’ birthplaces	Parents’ birthplaces
	Name of informant, relationship to deceased, and address	Name of informant, relationship to deceased, and address	Name of informant, relationship to deceased, and address
	Autopsy and laboratory tests dates	Autopsy
Name and location of cemetery	Name and location of cemetery	Name and location of cemetery	Name and location of cemetery
Date of burial	Date of burial or cremation	Date of burial or cremation	Date of burial or cremation
Funeral director's name and address	Funeral director's name and address	Funeral director's name and address	Funeral director's name and address

Are you scouring your ancestor's death certificate for every possible scrap of information?

How to Squeeze Everything Out of the Census

You may be overlooking critical, helpful census information.

If you're not wringing every last drop of data out of your ancestor's census sheet, you may be missing important pieces of your genealogy puzzle.

The U.S. has had a nationwide census every ten years since 1790. Very little survives of the 1890 census due to a fire, and the newest publicly available census is from 1940. There are also some states (like my own New York) with their own census in years ending in a five.

Focusing on the national censuses, the form and the information gathered changed each year. It's helpful to download blank census forms to more clearly see the column headings.

Are you grabbing every piece of information?

The census format changes every time. Don't miss any important facts.

Take a look at how the format varies over the years:

• 1790 recorded only the head of family's name. Family members were tallied in columns of free white men 16 and up or under 16, free white women of any age, and slaves.
• 1800 and 1810 also named only the head of family. Other members of the household were tallied and broken down into males and females in five age groups. And slaves.
• 1820 added a few more columns to capture foreigners not naturalized, manufacturers, free colored people and slaves.
• 1830 added even more age ranges.
• 1840 added columns for people working in seven different professions, for military pensioners, for those labelled deaf and dumb, blind and insane (white and colored persons separately), and for those attending different types of schools.
• 1850 Behold! We finally get to see the name of every person in the household, their color (white, black or mulatto), profession, place of birth, and if they were married or attended school within the year. The form also captured those over 20 who could not read and write, as well as those who were "deaf and dumb, blind, insane, idiotic, pauper or convict." Oh boy.
• 1860 no longer cared about the deaf, dumb and blind, but did care who was illiterate.
• 1870 More good news! This year added each person's birthplace, whether they had a foreign-born mother or father, and if they were eligible to vote.
• 1880 added "Relationship to head of household" and the place of birth of everyone's parents.
• 1890 was almost entirely lost, and it's heartbreaking to see all that was added. In denoting a person's race/color, it asked for two races I never heard of. It asked for marital status and whether you were married in the previous year, how many children a woman has had and how many were alive. It asked if you were born in the U.S., were naturalized or had declared your intention to become a citizen. It asked separately if you could read and if you could write, and which language you spoke. It asked about disease, afflictions, and whether you were a "prisoner, convict, homeless child, or pauper." Homeless child? They enumerated homeless children?
• 1900 added the street name and house number, number of years married, years of immigration and how long in the U.S., number of months unemployed, and if you owned or rented your home.
• 1910 included a column for Veteran of Civil War.
• 1920 got a bit intrusive. If you own your home, do you have a mortgage? And what is the mother tongue of your mother and father?
• 1930 was when the government got pushier. What is the value of your home or how much do you pay in rent? Do you own a radio? What was your age at first marriage? The form went into lots of occupation detail, asking your industry, whether you were unemployed or a veteran and of which war.
• 1940 added the highest grade of school completed, where you lived in 1935, whether you worked or were seeking work, and how much you earned.

Have you been documenting all of those facts, or was this an eye-opener for you?

Why not revisit some of those census forms to see what else you can discover?

Finally, take the time to look at a page or two before and after the one containing your ancestor. You may very well find other relatives living nearby.

7 Free Resources for the Frugal but Fanatical Genealogist

In high school my son had an assignment to create a document of his family tree. He laughed and said, "Mom, print that out for me?" That's as far as many people get: parents, grandparents, and a portion of their great grandparents.

But for those of us who keeping researching and researching, genealogy is a project that is never finished. And we don't mind at all.

Here are some free resources that won't "finish" your family tree, but they can make it stronger, broader, and more satisfying for you.

Census form

1. Free U.S. Censuses

Did you know that there's more to the census than the Federal census taken every 10 years? Some states also had their own census halfway between the Federal censuses. You can find the state and Federal versions for free on FamilySearch.org

2. Free New York Passenger Lists

Spanning the years 1820 through 1891, this free online collection can be searched or browsed by microfilm roll number, each roll spanning months. Another collection includes the years 1909 and 1925 through 1957.

Marriage certificate

3. Free U.S. Social Security Death Index

Search by name for SSDI records between 1962 and 2014. The results show the person's age, full name, birth and death dates, the state in which they died, and their last place of residence.

4. Free England and Wales Censuses

England and Wales censuses are available online from 1841 through 1911. Check out the full list of England resources on that page. You'll be impressed.

5. Free Canada Censuses

The Canada census is available online from 1851 through 1911 with a bonus year of 1906.

6. Free Find-a-Grave

Ship manifest

Have you considered trying Find a Grave for cemeteries worldwide? When you view their search form take a look at the pull-down menu next to "Cemetery in" and you may be surprised by the number of countries included. While the non-U.S. listings are slim, they are growing.

7. Free Genealogy Forms and Charts

If it helps you to have some paperwork to carry with you on your research travels, these genealogy forms and charts will be very useful. Print out ancestor charts, research logs, census forms, family record sheets, and more.

Everyone likes a bargain, and it is certainly worth your time to see what resources are out there that you haven't tapped into yet.

And speaking of free resources:

• What Language Barrier?
• Free Resource Provides Graphic Genealogy Research Basics
• Free Resource Lets You Plot Family Tree Locations

Mapping Your Ancestors Can Answer Questions

My parents grew up in a tight-knit neighborhood in the Bronx, New York. They went to grade school together, and it was a very small class of neighborhood kids. They had relatives nearby, either in their apartment buildings or on their blocks.

Family gatherings were held at the house where my mother was born until the time when our relatives no longer lived there or owned it. I have childhood memories of the neighborhood, but they're a bit vague now, and my mom's building was eventually torn down.

That's why I like to use "Street View" on either Google or Bing maps and feel like I'm driving through the neighborhood. I can use it to go right up to the door of the church where I was baptized, which is a couple of doors up from where my mom was born.

But you can do more with Bing and Google maps, like creating collections of addresses and plotting them on the map.

Based on all of my collected information—census forms, draft registration cards, city directories, death certificates—I plotted a handful of my closest relatives' addresses in the Bronx from 1900 to 1940. There were some outlying locations over the years (meaning a few blocks away), but the various families tended to cluster together again and again.

Plotting my great grandfather Giovanni Sarracino's handful of Bronx addresses finally helped me make sense of his on again/off again relationship with beer companies.

He and my great grandmother Maria Rosa came to America in July 1899 to join Maria Rosa's father Antonio (my first ancestor to come to America) in the Bronx. In 1900 and 1905, Giovanni and Maria Rosa did not live in the neighborhood where my parents later grew up. They were quite a few blocks away by St. Ann's Avenue.

That St. Ann's address is associated with Ebling's Brewery. Ebling was a famous brewery operating in the Bronx in those days, and William H. Ebling, Jr., was the vice-president of the Westchester Brewing Company in Mount Vernon, which borders the Bronx.

Going back to my collected documents, my great grandfather was a bartender in 1905, worked in a saloon in 1910, but after that he was a painter in buildings.

Now I know that he lived right by Ebling Brewery in the earlier years. He may have formed a business relationship with Ebling, because newspaper clippings I discovered showed that he sold a building to the Westchester County Brewing Company of Mount Vernon, New York for $2,500 in late 1912.

In 1921 he either bought or sold his former residence of 603 Morris Avenue (the abbreviations in the clipping make it difficult to understand), and he is listed in the transaction as "Ebling Brewing Co., agt [agent] Giovanni Sarracino et al."

Was my great grandfather flipping houses back in the day? Or was he buying or selling the building on behalf of Ebling for a piece of the sale?

In 2009 at a St. Ann's Avenue construction site, tunnels were unearthed and discovered to be the "Natural Caves" where Ebling aged their beer a century before, and they stretched quite a long distance.

Until I can find out more, I'd like to think Giovanni was selling the earth beneath his building for $3,000 in 1921 to age that crisp Bronx-water beer.

How to Avoid Going Down the Wrong Path

It's a good thing the Family Tree Maker^®/Ancestry.com^® TreeSync^® feature isn't working right now because that saved me from committing a genealogical sin.

I nearly posted bad information about someone. Publicly.

This wake-up call reminds me that it is so easy to be led astray when researching a family you know nothing about. It all started when a woman contacted me on ancestry.com about her great grandfather Rudolph, who is in my tree.

He is in my tree with very few facts because he was the father of a woman who married a cousin of mine. Since the cousin himself is so distant to me, I did not go into great detail about his wife's ancestors—just the names of her parents.

But after hearing from Rudolph's descendant and collaborating with her to find his marriage record, I spent a little time searching for more facts about him.

Many cultures embrace the practice of naming children after their grandparents, which is a potential pitfall for genealogists. I fell right into that trap yesterday, following the wrong Rudolph, son of the wrong August.

I found what seemed like Rudolph's family, but missing Rudolph, only to be told that while the husband and wife's names matched, the birthplace, immigration year, and occupation did not match what his descendant knew to be true and had thoroughly documented.

Multiple, agreeing sources let you know you've got things right.

There's a reason why everyone tells you start your family tree with yourself and work your way up. Once you get beyond the relatives you knew personally—such as your grandparents and their siblings—nothing is certain until you have an abundance of corroborating facts.

For example, if you're investigating a distant branch, such as the in-laws of your great great uncle, you probably won't have any first-hand knowledge of that family. To help ensure you're putting the right facts in your tree you'll need a few things:

• Your great great uncle's marriage record can give you his wife's name (let's call her June for this example), birth year, and her parents' names.
  
• Now you can look for June in census records, making sure to match the names you know and June's birth year.
  
• Once you find them you can search for the same family, possibly at the same address, in different census years, making sure the facts line up. There should not be too much discrepancy among the censuses when it comes to recorded immigration years, age, place of birth, and occupation. Since you know when June was married, you would not expect to find her with her family instead of her husband after that time.
  
• Before going too far with June's family, search for any military records for the man you've identified as her father. Check to see if the censuses closest to the military record match for residence, wife's name or number of children.

As I browse through my tree of 19,295 people, I can find a number of dubious facts that I know need further investigation. But you know what it's like. So many relatives, so little time.

Be careful with your genealogy facts out there.

Family Tree Maker is a registered trademark of The Software MacKiev Company. Ancestry.com and TreeSync are registered trademarks of Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.

POW: My Grandfather's World War I Experience

My grandfather Adamo Leone
(standing center) in World War I.

As a child I had a language barrier with my maternal grandfather. Adamo was a smiling, sweet man who didn't speak much and rarely in English.

He'd tell me in Italian to slow down or be quiet—with a smile on his face—but I don't remember him telling me stories.

I loved him unconditionally, but I knew nothing about him.

Perhaps the only tidbit of a story I had was that Adamo had been a prisoner of war during World War I, fighting for Italy, and that he was forced to eats rats to stay alive. That's all I ever heard.

With the 100th anniversary of World War I upon us, I've been thinking about my grandfather a lot, wondering where he fought, where he was imprisoned, and what horrible conditions he faced.

Some research into Italy's experience in World War I led me to the 1917 Battle of Caporetto in northern Italy. The battle was so devastating that 11,000 Italian soldiers died, 29,000 were wounded, and more than a quarter of a million were taken prisoner.

Adamo may have been among these prisoners.

The Austro-Hungarians who captured the Italians were unprepared to care for this many men. At least 100,000 Italian soldiers died in captivity. The men were kept in a large number of camps in places like Mauthausen (future site of a WWII concentration camp) and Milowitz, and they were dying from tuberculosis and starvation.

Adamo and family in America.

It's easy to imagine eating rats to stay alive.

The prisoners were doing hard labor in coal mines and stone quarries on a food supply of less than 1,000 calories a day.

Those who survived the camps until the end of the war were kept in quarantine camps by the Italian government so they could be interrogated and either cleared or prosecuted as traitors.

Adamo had come to America in 1914 to join a few of his cousins. He returned to Italy in August 1915, shortly after Italy entered the war. He did not leave for America again until February 1920, 15 months after the war ended.

I once heard that Adamo stayed with his parents in Italy for about two years, recovering from his captivity.

Imagine then making the decision to leave them forever to return to a better life in New York City.

It's easy to understand his sweeping this story under the rug. I'm just so glad he came back.

Why You Should Be Using the Free "Family Tree Analyzer"

Update: Family Tree Analyzer is now available for Mac.

In 2012 I had an idea for a genealogy program. I created a simple program called Census Taker to analyze your tree and produce a list of every person likely to be found in the newly released 1940 census.

It worked great for me, but it was limited. I studied Java programming, hoping to make the program better. I began rewriting my program, but time after time I ran into problems.

Then, suddenly, I found something in a Google search. A free program called Family Tree Analyzer that does everything I wanted my program to do—and a million times more. Goodbye, my fledgling programming career!

Programmer and genealogist Alexander Bisset makes it easy to analyze your family tree.

Family Tree Analyzer analyzed my 18,946-person tree without blinking. It provides a detailed table of each individual's facts in a flawless format that looks eerily like what I was struggling to do with my program.

The "Individuals" table helps you see what you're missing and plan your genealogy research accordingly.

It found every possible data error in my file. It found potential duplicate people. It let me export everything to a spreadsheet so I can fix the problems.

One small piece of what it does is like my Census Taker, but way better.

The Treetops button shows you the eldest person (or people) in your tree with a given surname. I entered my maiden name of "Iamarino". The Iamarinos at the top of 2 branches were born in 1640 and 1710. Awesome.

The Locations, Occupations and Sources tabs show how many people are associated with a particular source, place or job. I'll use it to find typos or places where I want to make the wording more consistent.

I've barely scratched the surface, but I strongly recommend you try this program. Family Tree Analyzer can provide you with all kinds of analysis to help you fortify your family tree.

Find out what else you can do with this free software:

• Use This Tool to Discover Family Tree Insights
• Run This Genealogy Report To Help Clean Up Your Dates
• How to Find Errors in Your Family Tree
• How to Handle the Unrelated People in Your Family Tree

When Is a Marriage Not a Marriage?

In January I wrote about how to handle the facts in your family tree that don't add up in How Is That Possible? I like to use Family Tree Maker's bookmark feature to call attention to the people in my tree who have a problem with their facts.

Bookmarks remind me to check the facts.

Today I took a look at Francesco Cece who was born in 1805 in my grandfather's town of Basélice, Benevento, Campania, Italy. His facts included three marriages, which was not uncommon in the 1800s.

If your spouse died back then, you were going to remarry. If you had children, they needed a new mother or father, and if you were old, you needed a younger spouse to take care of you.

Just look at my great great grandfather's case.

Francesco's three marriages were pretty close together, so I looked to see when wives number one and two died.

But wife number two was alive when he married wife number three, so something was wrong.

I decided to visit the online Benevento Archives to take a closer look at the marriage of Francesco Cece and Mariarosa Marucci.

I have not seen this a lot in my research, but Francesco and Mariarosa went through the process of publicly posting their intention to marry on 13 March 1831 and 31 March 1831.

They were granted permission to marry on 6 April 1831, but as you can see on their marriage license, the right column where their church wedding would be recorded was crossed out.

A handwritten note in that section of the page says that despite having a contract with one another, the couple were not united in marriage.

When I revisited this marriage record did I realize they never married?

Mariarosa entered into another marriage contract nine months later and married Saverio Colucci on 1 March 1832.

Francesco entered into a marriage contract five years later at age 31 with an 18-year-old girl from another town, Donata Maria Fantetta. Each of them had lost their parents, so this could have been a marriage of necessity for young Donata Maria.

Sadly, this contract also did not end up in marriage for Francesco Cece.

I checked the marriage records all the way through the year 1860 and never again saw Francesco's name.

His first and only wife, Margarita Capuano, died at the age of 25, just six years after they married. They had no children.

I've removed my bookmark from Francesco, but I don't think I'll soon forget him.

Married Thanks to a Royal Decree

While recording facts from my grandfather's Italian hometown's vital records, I noticed more than one extremely young person getting married. Often a young girl who was orphaned would be married with her grandfather's permission as a matter of survival. Her new husband could take care of her.

While revisiting some of these documents I found some young people who needed a royal decree before they could marry in 1818.

One was Michele Franco, a 16-year-old farmer who was about to marry a 19-year-old seamstress. They lived in different towns, so perhaps this was not an arranged marriage, but a marriage for love.

It's hard to imagine why else a 16-year-old boy from another town would be a suitable choice for this 19-year-old seamstress. Because of his age, Michele received a royal decree on 18 August 1818 granting him permission to marry.

Another, somewhat astonishing case is 12-year-old Mariantonia Marucci. She was not an orphan and had her parents' consent to marry 29-year-old Michelarcangelo Pettorossi, a bricklayer.

The couple had 10 children together starting when Mariantonia was the ripe old age of 15. Mariantonia received a royal decree on 24 February 1818 granting her permission to marry despite her lack of age.

I have no details about Mariantonia's parents, but maybe they were so impoverished that this was the only way they could provide a decent life for Mariantonia.

Mariantonia Marucci, age 12…authorized to marry despite her age, by royal decree.

Then there was 14-year-old Angelamaria Silvestro, who became an orphan at the age of 10.

Her grandfather was quite old when he gave her his consent to marry 29-year-old Serafino Verdura, a farmer. Angelamaria did not appear to need a royal decree which makes me wonder when and why such a court order was required.

You can understand the 12-year-old girl needing special permission, but why did the 16-year-old boy need it when the 14-year-old orphan girl did not?

Some research about the age of consent to marry in the 19th century seemed to indicate that it was perfectly fine for a 12-year-old girl to marry. It is possible that this particular area, or perhaps all of what was then the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, had their own age of consent rules.

In the early 1800s in the small Italian towns I've research, the average age at first marriage was about 25, so parents were not marrying off their children unless they really had to.

It's interesting to compare these two very young girls to modern-day Italians who must be 18 to marry—or 16 with court consent.

When I'm Sixty-Four I'll Still Have Only Two Children

I'm very keen on finding all family members rather than climbing my tree from parent to parent to parent.

I mean, if I knew the King of Italy were a dozen generations up the tree, I'd probably head straight for him, but I'm definitely from peasant stock.

Here's an example of how viewing every available vital record and documenting every single fact gave me an interesting insight into my great great grandfather, Nicoladomenico Leone, born in 1796 in Baselice, Italy.

While recording the facts from every Baselice vital record from 1809–1860, I found my great grandfather Giovannangelo Leone's birth record which told me his parents' names: Nicoladomenico Leone and Caterina Pisciotti.

But I was creeped out to see that the baby's mother was 36 and his father was 53. Then I learned it was a common practice at that time and place to remarry shortly after your spouse died and continue making the babies.

So many babies.

As I continued reviewing vital records I found an 1837 death record for my great great grandfather's first wife, Sinfarosa Ferella. She died at age 35 after giving birth six times (three of the babies died extremely young).

My 2nd great grandfather and his 2 wives had lots of kids, but some didn't survive long.

Nicoladomenico became a widower in late 1837 and surprisingly waited four-and-a-half years before remarrying.

But he appears to have married his eldest daughter's classmate. Angelamaria Leone and Caterina Pisciotti were both born in 1819.

Both Angelamaria and her only surviving sister, Gelsomina, were still living with their father when he married this 22-year-old girl that they surely knew.

It must've been weird at that dinner table, don't you think?

By combing through all of these records I found that Nicoladomenico Leone fathered 12 children, 5 of whom died in infancy.

The last one I know about (because the records end in 1860) was born when Nicoladomenico was 64 years old.

My great great grandfather went on to live 91 years, probably because he was not a contadino (farmer) his whole life. No, he left the fields and had what was most likely an easier life as a butler, a broker, a coachman, and at age 64, a tavern keeper.

His occupation was written on each of his children's birth records, giving me a full timeline of his career.

You have to admire the stamina of this man. I'm from peasant stock, yes, but apparently that's a strong and hearty stock.