Friday, October 24, 2014

Ancestry.com Updates Pennsylvania Death Certificates - Now 1906-1963

I posted Finding Genealogy Gems in Pennsylvania Death Certificates, 1906-1944 on 2 July 2014, and Ancestry.com has now extended the collection through 1963.

The Pennsylvania Death Certificates, 1906-1963, database is at  http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=5164.  The database description says:

"Pennsylvania’s Department of Health began keeping birth and death records on a statewide basis on January 1, 1906. This collection includes death records beginning on that date through 1963. Later records will eventually be added to this collection.

"Death certificates recorded the following details:
  • name and residence of the decedent
  • city and county of death
  • gender and race
  • marital status
  • age and date of birth
  • occupation
  • place of birth
  • parents' names and birthplaces
  • date of death
  • dates attended by physician
  • cause of death
  • attending physician and address
  • length of stay in hospital or institution or length of residency for transients or recent arrivals
  • place of burial or removal
  • date of burial
  • undertaker name and address
  • name and address of informant
"Records of stillbirths were required to be filed as both a birth and death record, so you may find records of stillborn children in this collection."

Previously, I "mined" this database for "gems" in my genealogy family tree database, especially for surnames Carringer, Vaux, Seaver and Remley. So now I need to search for others of those surnames who died after 1944.

Here is the search page for this database.  I entered the surname "carringer" in the search field, and entered a death date of 1954 plus/minus 10 years (in order to find only those who died between 1944 and 1964):



I clicked on Search and there were 23 entries for Carringer:


I will go through these one by one and enter information from these death certificates into my family tree database.  Then I'll do the other surnames, and now that this collection is complete, I will find persons with other surnames who are in this database using the Record Hint in this specific database outlined in More on Finding Record Hints for a Specific Database on Ancestry.com.  The database number for this record collection is dbid=5164.

The URL for this post is: http://www.geneamusings.com/2014/10/ancestrycom-updates-pennsylvania-death.html

Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver




3 comments:

bgwiehle said...

Thanks for the heads-up on the update!
I've been going through my list of Pennsylvania deaths, and like you, put in a death year range of 1955 +-10.
For some reason, some of the post-1960 deaths do not appear in the list of matches. Put in an exact year or leave the year blank, and then they appear! Could there be a formatting error in those dates?

IsraelP said...

Thank you. This is the first announcement I have seen of the post-1944 records.

Dona said...

Thanks, Randy, this gave me some great results. Shows you the value of checking back with databases you've used before, for updates, or just to search the new people you may have added to your tree.