Civil death certificates
A civil death certificate carries the decedent's name, date and place of death, cause of death, age at death, sex, race (as recorded at the time), marital status, occupation, birthplace, parents' names and birthplaces, and the informant — typically a spouse, child, or next of kin. The informant field is worth reading closely: the accuracy of the parents' names often reflects how close the informant actually was to the deceased.
Cause-of-death language tracks medical and cultural norms of the era. Consumption, apoplexy, dropsy, and la grippe all appear on 19th-century certificates and map to tuberculosis, stroke, edema, and influenza respectively. A coroner's notation — coron., inq. — points to an inquest file that often survives separately in county court records.
Parish burial registers
Pre-civil-registration deaths appear in the burial register of the family's church. Latin shorthand dominates: obiit (died), sep. (sepultus, 'buried'), aet. (aetatis, 'aged'). A marginal cross or the letter D. next to a name in a family register may mark the death date. Burial registers often pair with cemetery books that record plot assignments and reinterments.
Probate as a death-record substitute
When no death certificate is available, probate files are the next-best anchor. The opening petition names the decedent, the approximate date of death, the surviving heirs, and their relationship to the deceased — exactly the data a death certificate would carry. See the guide on probate records for how to navigate the packet.