Death certificates

Death causes are very important for our data. Here is a helpful tip Irene wrote in one of her checks.

When you have a death date from Find A Grave or the mil info, you can quickly search to see if their death certificate is available on Ancestry's All Records search page by entering their exact death year and state.

We're noticing that death certificates, even when they are easy to find, don't always come up in the hints. If you've only found a document with a death date, go ahead and do a quick search to see if you can find a death certificate. Some states have a lot of death certificates available online and more are becoming available all the time. It's worth a little extra effort to see if the death certificate is available.