Michael A. O’Neill

Category: Death

  • What to do if you can’t find a death certificate

    I’ve been looking at U.S. death certificates recently, noting that the genealogical information in them could be mistaken, depending on the person reporting that data.

    But what do you do if you can’t find a death certificate?
    Here are my recommendations:

    1. Check the website of the state health department for information on whether deaths were previously registered by counties.
    2. Use find-a-grave. Carefully.
    3. Check the newspaper, especially outside cities.
    4. Look for probate records.

    Before I get into this in any detail, though, let me ask you: do you really need your ancestor’s date of death? If you already have proof of their children and parents, you probably won’t gain anything. And if you’re looking for parents, you probably won’t find them on pre-1900 death registrations.

    The U.S. has a federal system, and that means an inconsistent mish-mash of death registration, especially from 1900 to about 1915, when most states adopted a standard form recommended by the Census Bureau, and centralized reporting from county and municipal control. Before about 1905, though, finding death registrations is the exception, not the rule.

    If you’re researching a death in the early 1900s, it’s worth visiting the website of your state’s health department. It will always list when the state began collecting records, and what to do if counties registered deaths prior to that. I’ve had mixed results here: most of the time, the counties will point me back to the state, but there are exceptions.

    Take Illinois: the state’s department of health website points you to county registrars for deaths prior to 1916. And for Illinois, you might just be in luck: DeKalb County, for example, sells these records online for a few bucks.

    What if county registrars don’t record earlier deaths? To use other sources effectively, you really need to be able to narrow things down to within a couple years and to a particular location. Find-a-grave is very good for this—you can get a year of death, possible even a date, and people were almost always buried close to where they died.

    I won’t go into Find-a-grave in detail—I have a set of videos about how to use that source—but here’s the quick version. Only rely on what’s carved into a tombstone. Everything else on a memorial is submitted by a user, and you can’t know the quality of their research. Still, assume good intent and take other info as a starting point.

    Another great source are newspapers death notices and obituaries. I’ve got a distinct video on how to track down newspaper resources, but here’s a quick summary. The United States used to be a nation of newspapers. Just about every town had one, and all of them earned revenue from death notices. The smaller the town, the smaller the newspaper, the more affordable the death notice, the greater chance for genealogical detail in the notice.

    Same went for obituaries—big city papers might only publish obituaries for leading luminaries and the most sensational deaths, but the press in little town might cover more.

    Your final best bet is to find probate documents. That’s a pretty complicated topic, though, so I’ll leave that to another video as well. Again, you’re going to need a county and a year, but don’t assume that probate will happen in the same place as death & burial. Trains made it possible to transport corpses, so a person could be buried in a different county or even state. Conversely, without trains, people were buried where they died, which might not have been where they lived.

    Let’s take a real example that wraps all of this up: my wife’s 2nd great-grandfather, Willard Harding. His tombstone in Mount Vernon, Washington notes that he died on 20 July 1907 at the age of 39.

    If you visit Washington Department of Health site, it states quite clearly that after 1 July 1907, the state collected death certificates. But they couldn’t find Willard’s. I followed the site’s direction to check with the county Auditor, but no luck there either. I followed a lead from a member of my wife’s family that he had died in Wentachee, and found an obituary index from the Wenatchee Genealogical society.

    When I got my hands on the articles, I got the whole story: Willard had been nearly bedridden for two years, and had visited Soap Lake in Grant County, which was a big health spa at the time. He became seriously ill on the train home, and was pulled off in Wenatchee where he died. His body was then shipped home to Skagit County.

    Why wasn’t there a death certificate? Maybe there was confusion over which county was supposed to record his death? Or maybe the Wenatchee doctor wasn’t even aware of the new law?

    Willard knew he was dying, so he made out his will at the age of 38. That will was probated in Skagit County.

  • A poem on books

    This definitely should’ve been in Dad’s eulogy. And it applies just as well to the rest of the family.

    Books to the ceiling,
     Books to the sky,
      My pile of books is a mile high.
       How I love them! How I need them!
        I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.
                            –Arnold Lobel

    This too:
    To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser. — Robertson Davies

  • One year since Joe passed

    It’s been one year and one day since Joe passed. It was yesterday, around 10am.

    Chanel and I spent a good part of the past two days cleaning out Joe’s basement office. It seems like he saved every scrap of paper he scribbled on over the past thirty years. He didn’t of course, but it seemed like it at times. My nose has been flowing like a toddler’s with a cold from all the dust and mold that has collected and grown on his books and papers. But it’s gone. It’s empty. Just a few books left on the five bookshelves the man had down there (this is on top of the eight bookshelves in the living room).

    Found lots of fun little mementos. For example, a letter that I scrawled out when I was five or six: "I hate Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan is crazy. Ronald Reagan doesn’t know 10×10." Ah, the effect parents have on their children’s politics. We also found my report cards from grade school, which perhaps explains why I didn’t choose a more challenging multiplication task for that icon of Republican politics: "Michael needs to work harder on his multiplication tables from 6 to 9." Still not good at six through eight, but I figured out the nines.

    We also started the leaving bits of Joe all over P*******n. Mom brought five ziploc baggies of his ashes on a walk along the D&R canal. Finn, Ellie, Chanel and Mom each dumped a bag of Joe along the canal. I saved mine, and on the ride home, I deposited little bits all over: at Borough Hall, at Morven next door, at Aquinas House (where Joe first lived in P*******n when he was still a Jesuit), and at the theological seminary (where Joe was a Ph.D. student, and where mom and Joe first lived after they got married).

    Mom admitted that she hasn’t been able to banish her recollections of Joe’s last moments. I suggested she write it down. I know that my blog entry about Joe’s last minutes on this Earth helped push it out of my mind.

  • One day you’ll wake up…

    Dennis said that one day, you’ll just wake up and realize you’re dealing with it better.

    I thought I’d hit that day months ago. I thought the eulogy I delivered had helped me grieve. When Mom and Chanel talked about dreams and memories of Dad, I felt I’d moved passed that.

    But all it took was a couple of glasses of wine and the death of a fictional character on a stupid TV show (albeit this was during an emotional 24 hours when I unexpectedly saw my once best friend, and after I received word about… well, driving to work). All it took was the blank dead eyes of some barely engaging spoiled brat on a TV show. No, not just the eyes, but the realization that a life had reached its end, no matter how badly you may hope the reverse.

    I’m not sure Dennis is right. I think it will always be there, just below the surface. On days when you desperately want to share, when you desperately need to talk to someone who’s no longer there, you’ll discover the grief is just as strong as it was the day it happened, and you’ll just bawl.

  • Stamps from Palestine

    Arafat_1
    A brief addendum to my post about selling my Dad’s stamp collection.

    The man saved everything. He even saved an envelope I sent him when I was in the West Bank.

    Now, before I left Ramallah, I had planned to buy a few blocks of Palestinian Authority stamps, because I was so deeply amused to see Arafat’s ugly mug on a stamp. Of course, I forgot.

    But Dad saved the envelope, including this stamp.

  • Unintentionally secretive

    I’ve been debating about putting my last name and hometown on my blog. Identity theft is such an issue. Anyway, still won’t mention it in the blog, but it’s sorta obvious from the name of the newspaper…

    But my resolve evaporated with this interesting article by Marjorie Censer in one of the local papers on Joe’s efforts to negotiate with the University over its contribution to Borough tax revenues (the University is a non-profit, so does not need to pay taxes, even though it consumes a massive amount of Borough resources).

    I just can’t resist posting the article, because of this one line that Marjorie wrote: "Council members said they heard from [Joe] only sporadically, and some felt like they didn’t know what was going on."

    One council member, Roger Martindell, went so far as to say that Joe’s negotiations were "undefined, undisclosed and not institutionalized in
    any way."

    My mom was so pleased that others felt Joe was secretive!

    Of course, it wasn’t that Joe was secretive, as mom admitted after her initial delight and amusement had faded. It was just that Joe didn’t share if he didn’t feel a need to. He didn’t deliberately keep council in the dark. It just didn’t occur to him to share.

    Like the time he asked a fellow Jesuit at Aquinas House in P——-n for a ride to the bus station one summer in the late 1960s. His colleague, who shared the responsibility with Joe for giving Mass that summer, asked where Joe was going.

    ‘To the airport,’ Joe said.

    ‘Oh, where are you flying?’

    ‘Germany,’ Joe replied.

    ‘For how long?’ asked his increasingly alarmed fellow Jesuit.

    ‘All summer.’

    It’s not like Joe was hiding anything. I mean, he asked the fellow for a ride, and answered all his questions. It just didn’t occur to him to tell him sooner.

  • A Fine Collection

    That’s what this fellow, Wayne Gehret, said of my father’s stamp collection when I sold it to him today.

    Joe started collecting as a kid in the 1930s, steaming canceled stamps off of envelopes and pasting them into a hand-made book. For many of the stamps, he had actually cut off the little… chads, I guess… to make the stamps a much cleaner square.

    He became a bit more serious about it later in life, probably after he and mom had settled in P——-n and weren’t worrying about money so much anymore. Most of what he had came from his lifetime, and the majority of that from the post-war period. Wasn’t worth much more than face value. But he had some blocks of stamps dating from the 1890s to 1920s that were worth something, and I sold the entire collection for just under $5,000. Joe, of course, alleged the collection was worth twice that, but as the collector, he would be prone to overvalue things. Add in that I would have to sell each block individually to get top dollar (and he had hundreds of blocks of stamps), selling to a dealer at a discount made sense.

    Wayne asked if there was any story behind the collection. I felt like I was depriving him of part of the experience because I didn’t have a story to share. Stamps were something Joe did on his own. He tried to get me interested, but it never took. That was it, really.

    I spent some time looking through Joe’s coin collection, too. Except for some worn, circulated silver peace dollars from the 1920s and a couple of Indian head nickels, everything dated from 1970 onward. Worth a few dollars for each set.

  • Last moments: Mom’s perspective

    When I got in to P——-n last night, mom and I talked about my recollection of Dad’s last moments. Much to my surprise and amusement, she had a completely different take on what happened, even down to how much time elapsed (she thought it couldn’t have been two or three minutes, when I thought it took at least ten before it was over).

    Mom was standing by the bed as Joe was getting up. She said that, all of a sudden, he simply collapsed, with part of his weight falling on her. She couldn’t support him, so told him to fall back on to the bed. I don’t think she could tell you if Joe was able to respond at that point, or whether she was able to redirect some of his movement so that he fell back on the bed. But he did.

    When she called me upstairs, she said she felt that Joe had suffered a massive collapse, probably coronary, and that it was all over. But she didn’t know what to do next which is why she called the nurse. She had no recollection of pulling out the flyer to determine if this was it or not, and insists she didn’t think for a second that this wasn’t the end. In fact, she added that she specifically recalled taking note of one sign of imminent death just a few moments before Dad collapsed. (In case you can’t figure it out, I’m holding back a few details in these posts).

    She also said that I was talking about pounding on Dad’s chest to try to revive him, but that she talked me out of it. Of course, I only recall sharing my mental process–that I felt like I should, but that Joe wouldn’t have wanted it.

    Anyway, I’m quite sure my version of events is just as valid (and invalid) as hers. Our own little Rashomon.

  • Last moments

    Ever since October, I’ve been going over my Dad’s last moments in my mind. Over. And over. And over. Can’t get ’em out. Probably never will. But maybe writing them out will make them run through my head less frequently.

    Be forewarned: this post is about the death part of life, and it may not be pleasant reading.

    The day before, my Dad, Joe, got a call from his doctor, telling him his kidneys were failing, and that he needed to come in for another transfusion. That was it. Joe had had enough. He declined the transfusion, and asked to go on hospice care.

    (more…)