General Chat

Hi guys

Im new to all this and now used to finding births etc.

I was wondering if there is an easy way of trying to find out a death date? Alot of my relatives now I have the birth date for but havent got one death date as yet?

Can someone advice please?

Hope you can help

Mx

Not an easy task trying to find a death date .
Even if you have their birth date lots of things happen that can alter the path they tread in life.
Different country/marriages etc.etc.

Afraid we researchers have to spend many hours looking for clues.....unless you're very fortunate and family have lived in the same area through the generations.
Good luck
Mau x

thanks for your help

Yeah all my family used to live in the South Shields area so fingers crossed that might help me lol

It really depends on when your relatives died. The problem is that on Ancestry (which a lot of people use for research) they have got all births and marriages transcribed right up to 2006, so all you need to do is put in the name and look through the results for one in the right area.

However deaths are only transcribed between 1837 and 1915 and again between 1984 and 2006. Between 1915 and 1984 you have to search all the images for every qtr of every year for the name you want which can be a very time consuming task. You need to try to narrow down the time of death as much as possible - by trying to find out if the person was still alive when their children married etc.

Hopefully Ancestry will have all deaths transcribed before too long - they are in the process of getting it done right now.

Kath. x

a few people have mentioned ancestory. Is that site worth paying the money for and is the search easier on there than here?

Ancestry is well worth the subscription (although it seems expensive at first) and is much better than paying for credits on Genes.

Genes don't hold any records themselves - they just direct you to other places.

Kath. x

How recent are the deaths?
I shortened the odds by looking a censuses.
If the person was there in 1881 and not there in 1891, I looked on Free BMD - http://www.freebmd.org.uk/cgi/search.pl
between those dates for the death.
Unfortunately Free BMD hasn't got many records after the 1920's, but family members usually knew the later dates- if only approximately.
I then searched in the local records office (who hold BMD's for the whole country) - a long trawl and useful if you could at least get an approximate year of death.

It is well worth "killing people off".

The informant on my great grandfather's death certificate was a daughter I had no knowledge off and has put me in touch with his second family, formed after he split up with his first wife, which also unknown to me.