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I like to explore the stories about people close to my ancestors, but not always necessarily related. I've come across at least three missing death certificates in time periods when death certificates were issued. I 'know' the people died because it made the newspaper. They were not natural deaths.
Story 1, Mid-1920's: One guy was in a shootout with my relative. The guy and my relative both died, but my relative has a death certificate and the other guy doesn't. The other guy died before the sheriff showed up. My relative was arrested and died in the hospital a few days later.
Story 2, Later 1920's: Another one of my relative's made a written statement accusing one of his in-laws of poisoning another guy's whiskey with strychnine. It was a deliberate poisoning and apparently, the case was never solved. I've found a couple of the newspaper articles. There is a headstone and dates, but no death certificate. I found out that there is a funeral home book at a public library, but haven't tracked that down. The story made a couple of papers/
Story 3, Another state Before 1920: I was tracking this story because I thought the person might be related. The family story is the person committed suicide by drinking lye. No obituary has been found and other deaths and suicides have been recorded. Plenty of other people have death certificates.
Is there a reason why these people don't have death certificates? My assumption is that some sort of examiner had to make a decision as to cause of death. Were these all considered crimes and is there some sort of exemption for not fining a death certificate?
Not everyone was compliant with the law to register deaths (or births), especially early on when the laws were set. Depending on the state and when they started issuing death certificates, deaths in the 1920s or earlier could very well fall within the time period of a lack of general compliance. When a crime was committed, you'd think the body would be examined, but I don't know what the laws were regarding autopsies at that time or place. Perhaps deaths registered by a medical examiner were not made public? It's really hard to say without knowing where it occurred.
Two deaths occurred in the same state.One death occurred in another.
In the first story, there were two men who died as a result of the same incident, Both died in the same county. One man died at his home, but the other died at a local hospital a few days later. There was an investigation with local sheriff's officers. The local sheriff's office no longer has those files. We've checked. They aren't sure what happened to the files. I know there is a record from the funeral home for the man with the missing death certificate.
Funeral home records can have interesting info- I found an ancestor's nickname in one.
I have some state online death indexes I will look in (if I have the right state's), if you want to post info here.
The CDC maintain directory of addresses & fees for obtaining each state's death certificates. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/w2w/index.htm
It happens. My great grandmother died in 1940 while living with her son. I have her obituary and know where she is buried, but no death certificate. I was finally able to get a supervisor from the state Vital Records Dept on the phone. At her request, I sent her the obit and she said she would search. She called me back in a week to say she couldn’t explain why, but there was no record of her death. We later found a similar situation for one of her children. A while later, I was discussing it with a volunteer at the local genealogical society. He said there were numerous similar reports around that time period, all related to one funeral home. Although never proven, the conclusion was the funeral home never got around to filing the appropriate paperwork. At some point, the funeral home closed suddenly and refused to ever release their funeral records to any historical library.
The certificates may have been issued but the handwriting was hard to read and names were interpreted incorrectly.
I remember trying to find my great grandfather’s provincial government death record online. Based on census records, I knew he had to have died between 1901 and 1906 in Saskatchewan. From time to time I tried different spellings as he wasn’t consistent throughout his life in how he spelled his name. No luck.
Then I was inspired. His first name was Franz (Frank) which was not too common. So I did a first-name-only search by year and read through all the names that resulted. I hit paydirt in the year 1903. His surname started with the letters “St”. Whoever had transcribed the name interpreted the “St” to be an “H”. I was puzzled at first. Then I searched to see what “St” looked like if written in curly German script. Mystery solved.
The certificates may have been issued but the handwriting was hard to read and names were interpreted incorrectly.
I remember trying to find my great grandfather’s provincial government death record online. Based on census records, I knew he had to have died between 1901 and 1906 in Saskatchewan. From time to time I tried different spellings as he wasn’t consistent throughout his life in how he spelled his name. No luck.
Then I was inspired. His first name was Franz (Frank) which was not too common. So I did a first-name-only search by year and read through all the names that resulted. I hit paydirt in the year 1903. His surname started with the letters “St”. Whoever had transcribed the name interpreted the “St” to be an “H”. I was puzzled at first. Then I searched to see what “St” looked like if written in curly German script. Mystery solved.
I had a similar situation. Had to find a great grandmother with a Last Name only search. Her first name was Nancy but is clearly Nanny on her d/c. Also last name ends in 2 T's. It's one T on d/c.
Oddly the respondent was her own daughter.
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