Instructor

Death records tell us more than when a person died. They may identify parents, spouses, children, residences, occupations, military service, religious affiliation, cause of death, burial place, property ownership, and community connections. This opening session introduces the broad range of records generated by death and discusses how records can work together to open doors to an ancestor’s life and family.

Topics include civil death records, death registers, mortality schedules, coroner’s and medical examiner’s records, pension files, military death records, Social Security and benefit records, institutional records, and other substitutes for missing death certificates.

Newspapers can preserve the public story of death: death notices, obituaries, funeral notices, accident reports, illness accounts, memorial tributes, estate notices, inquest reports, and community responses. This session shows how to search newspapers effectively to find different types of death-related newspaper items.

The session will also address common problems in newspaper research: finding particular newspapers online, dealing with OCR errors and variant names, exaggerated memorial language, and the pitfalls of family-supplied information.

This session turns to the records of burial, mourning, and memorialization. Cemetery records, gravestones, burial permits, funeral home records, church burial registers, sexton’s books, lot records, perpetual-care files, monument inscriptions, and memorial cards can place an ancestor in a family, congregation, ethnic community, neighborhood, or migration chain.

Participants will learn how to evaluate cemetery evidence, distinguish burial place from place of death, interpret cemetery lot ownership, connect burials to church membership, and use funeral and burial records to identify relatives and associates. The session also discusses modern cemetery databases and memorial websites, including how to verify user-contributed information against original records.

Probate records show what happened after death: who inherited, who administered the estate, who owed or was owed money, who bought estate property, who acted as guardian, and who appeared in court. This session explains the probate process and introduces wills, administrations, inventories, estate accounts, bonds, receipts, guardianships, partitions, dower records, and related court records.

Participants will learn how to move beyond the will, track an estate through the full file or docket, identify heirs and associates, and use probate records even when no will exists.

Special attention will be given to connections with family and associates, women’s identities, minor children, blended families, and clues to land, debt, migration, and kinship.