US Death Records, Obituaries and Cemeteries

Chapter 4 · Life in America · Death & obituaries

An American death certificate may name the parents, but those fields can be blank. The birthplace and the spellings come from whoever supplied the information, sometimes a grieving son or daughter or an institution’s records. A death notice in the Polish-language press, written by the family in Polish, can name the village and the parish. Read the two together and check one against the other.

Old Polish-language cross gravestones among trees in St. Adalbert Cemetery, Pittsburgh — Polish gravestones in the old wooded section of St. Adalbert Cemetery, a Polish Catholic cemetery in Pittsburgh. Inscriptions like "urodzona" (born) and "umarła" (died) give dates that can confirm a death record.

When state death certificates begin

Each state began registering deaths in its own year, and many cities and counties started earlier. Before statewide registration, look for county or city registers, parish burial records and newspapers.

State	Statewide death records	What to know
Pennsylvania	1906	Earlier deaths were recorded only sporadically by counties and some cities.
Illinois	1916	Earlier Chicago deaths are Cook County records, which begin after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
Michigan	1867; certificate form from 1897	An 1897 law replaced the county ledger entries with a more detailed certificate.
New York	1881, outside New York City	New York City records are at the NYC Municipal Archives. Buffalo, Albany and Yonkers deaths before January 1, 1914 stay with those cities.
Wisconsin	October 1907	The Wisconsin Historical Society indexes earlier records online.

The lines that matter

Birthplace: usually just “Poland”, “Russia”, “Austria” or “Germany”, which points to the partition, not the village
Father’s name and mother’s maiden name, and on many certificates the parents’ birthplaces
Burial place and undertaker, which lead you to the cemetery office and the funeral home
Informant: the person who supplied the answers

Why the informant decides the spelling

The informant was usually a spouse or an adult child, and an American-born child often spelled a grandparent’s name the way it sounded. Polish feminine endings add a second trap: a mother born Marianna Szymańska can appear as “Mary Shimanski”, “Mary Szymanski” or simply “Mary”, since American records often dropped the -ska ending. Treat the parents’ names as clues to test, not spellings to search exactly. A widow knew her husband’s parents better than a son-in-law did.

Stone mausoleum with columns and a statue of Christ in St. Adalbert Cemetery, Pittsburgh — A 1906 mausoleum in St. Adalbert Cemetery, the Polish Catholic cemetery in Pittsburgh's Carrick neighborhood ("Ks." means Father). Such cemeteries kept burial registers naming the next of kin.

Free indexes and images

FamilySearch, free with an account: statewide and county collections, including an index to Cook County deaths, 1871 to 1998.
Pennsylvania: certificates from 1906 to 1972 are on Ancestry, free to Pennsylvania residents through an Ancestry Pennsylvania account. The State Archives posts indexes to the certificate numbers.
Michigan: Michiganology, from the Archives of Michigan, shows certificate images through 1948 and an index for 1949 to 1952. Search by the father’s or mother’s name, with ? for one uncertain letter and * for a variable ending.
Illinois: the State Archives has a Pre-1916 Statewide Death Index and an index to certificates filed from 1916 to 1972.

Ceremony laying flowers at Paderewski's temporary grave, Arlington, 1953 — Flowers laid at the temporary grave of Ignacy Jan Paderewski at Arlington National Cemetery, 29 June 1953. American cemeteries hold Polish history too. Polona, Biblioteka Narodowa

Death notices in the Polish-language press

Families paid for short death notices in the Polish dailies. The Polish Genealogical Society of America indexes those in Chicago’s Dziennik Chicagoski from 1890 to 1971. Many families never bought a notice, so a blank result proves nothing.

Parts of Dziennik Chicagoski, Dziennik Narodowy and Zgoda are digitized in Chronicling America and the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections. For Dziennik Związkowy, Milwaukee’s Kuryer Polski or New York’s Nowy Dziennik, check library holdings for your year. See Polish-American newspapers for the titles and searching Polish names in newspaper OCR for search tactics.

In the notice	Meaning
zmarł, zmarła	died (man, woman)
w wieku lat	at the age of … years
urodzony w, urodzona w	born in
rodem z	native of, followed by the place name
z parafii	from the parish of
powiat, gubernia	district, province
z domu	née, followed by the maiden name
pozostawił w smutku, pozostawiła w smutku	leaves in sorrow, followed by the survivors
pogrzeb odbędzie się	the funeral will take place

Place names change their endings after Polish prepositions: rodem z Łazisk means native of Łaziska. Find the base form before searching a gazetteer.

Cemetery and interment records

The certificate names the cemetery. Catholic cemetery offices keep interment records with the burial date, grave location and often the funeral home, and the lot record shows who shares the grave. See Polish-American cemeteries and funeral home records.

Step by step

Narrow the date and place of death from the census, city directories and family papers
Search the state or city index and note the certificate number
Get the image and copy out the informant, both parents, the birthplace, the cemetery and the funeral home
Read the Polish-language paper for the week after the death under the Polish spelling, then the English-language paper
Ask the cemetery for the interment record and photograph the stone and the graves around it
Note who supplied each fact before you count matching records as confirmation

A hypothetical example

The family is invented. Jan Wróbel dies in Chicago in March 1931. His certificate says born “Russia”, father “Jos. Wrobel”, mother “Mary, unknown”; the informant is a son-in-law. The PGSA index lists a Dziennik Chicagoski notice four days later. Placed by his widow, Józefa z domu Kaczmarek, it says he was rodem z a named village and gives the powiat and parish. The search in Poland now starts from a parish, where his baptism should supply the mother’s maiden name the certificate left blank.

Read a real death certificate: George F. Penfield, 1911

This actual California document is headed Duplicate Certificate of Death and names Geo. F. Penfield. The Wikimedia Commons catalog identifies him as George Franklin Penfield (1852-1911) and gives the State of California as its source. It is an example of an American civil record, not evidence of Polish ancestry or a PoloniaRoots client result.

California duplicate death certificate for Geo. F. Penfield, Stockton, February 21, 1911, with unfilled parent-name fields — Geo. F. Penfield, California duplicate death certificate, local registered number 86, 1911. State of California; scan via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Source and full record.

Field on the scan	Reading	How to use it
Place of death	Stockton, San Joaquin County; Stockton State Hospital	Search the place of death separately from the person’s earlier residence.
Date of death	February 21, 1911	Use this date to narrow newspaper and burial searches.
Name and occupation	Geo. F. Penfield; insurance agent	Search George and the abbreviated Geo. with the occupation as an identity check.
Birth information	Year 1852; age 59; Vermont as birthplace	The month and day are not supplied. Do not invent a complete birth date.
Parent information	No parent names or birthplaces are supplied; the fields carry check-like marks	Record them as not supplied instead of copying names from an online tree.
Informant	Hospital records; Stockton State Hospital	The information was attributed to institutional records, not a named relative.
Burial or removal	Oakland, California; February 22, 1911	Verify the handwritten destination and burial details against cemetery or funeral records.
Record locator	Local registered number 86	Keep the locality and year with the number when citing or requesting the record.

Read the left-hand personal section separately from the physician’s medical certification on the right. A well-documented death date does not make an absent parent name available or establish how accurately an institution knew a patient’s birthplace. In a Polish immigrant’s certificate, a broad birthplace such as Russia or Austria would likewise need comparison with naturalization, passenger and parish records.

The burial field gives a place different from the place of death. That is a practical reason to search beyond the county where the death was registered. The scan also contains filing marks later than the death. Keep the death, burial and registration dates separate; search obituaries around the death date rather than a later filing stamp.

Cite the image and describe missing information

A usable citation includes Geo. F. Penfield, California State Board of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Duplicate Certificate of Death, Stockton, San Joaquin County, February 21, 1911, local registered number 86, followed by the scan link and your access date. State that the supplied scan is a duplicate and transcribe the name as written. The expanded name in the catalog should remain distinguishable from the abbreviated name on the record.

For your own ancestor, make three short lists: facts supplied, fields left unfilled, and readings that need checking. Here, the unfilled parent fields direct the next search toward other sources. For a Polish-American family, an obituary, a marriage record, an SS-5 application when released, or a parish register may supply those names. A missing answer on a death certificate does not mean the information never existed.

Sources and research tools

How we can help

Death records and obituaries are searched within Ancestral Village Identification and Immigration & Passenger Records, especially when earlier records are silent.

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