Can You Find Public Death Records?

You may think that you would never have a use for public death records, but that may not be the case. There are some types of records that you may wish to find that can be hit and miss, but death records are typically public domain and are not quite as hard to find. Most people who use these are looking for someone that they use to know or a long lost family member. They look in all the right places and find nothing, so they end up fearing the worst and look for records of death. Sadly, this is where some people are found. It's not fun to find someone this way, but at least the search has an ending.

One of the best places to find public death records is through newspaper obituaries. Before the Internet, if you did not catch something like this in your local paper, you may have had to go to the paper and search archives. Today, you can do this online and you are not limited to the records for your local area. You can find someone anywhere if their obituary was posted through a newspaper that also features these on their web site. Many save these online for quite some time, though you may have to pay a small fee for older entries. This helps the newspaper pay for the bandwidth and storage needed to keep them there for people like you.

The Social Security index is a great place to find public death records. You may not find a lot of information here about how or why someone died, but you can get confirmation that they have indeed passed away. This works best if you know someone's Social Security number, but you do not have to have it to find someone. When you get a hit there, you may see quite a few people with the same name. That is when the SS number is helpful, but you may identify someone by their date of birth or where they lived the last time you were in contact.

You may also find someone if you use the same search engines you use to find anything else. You should go to your favorite search and type in someone's name and then see what you can get to come up. You should look through the general results, but you can also look through the news results. You hope someone will not die in a way that warrants a news story, but that can be the case at times. These are not official public death records, but they can give you the information that you seek so that you finally know what happened to someone.

Some web sites can find and disclose public death records to you when you can not find them on your own. At times, these are hard to find, especially when someone died a while back. Older records are more deeply buried and are not going to be easy to find by the average Internet user. These sites often charge a small fee for their services, but they can find these death records for you, or any other type of public record that you may seek on someone. When you have to know more, this may be where you can find the information you have not been able to find through your own search.