How do you find out what caused the death in childhood of my relatives?

Question

Hospital records? Gravestones? What's a good cheap resource for this?

Answer 1

Relatives.

If you can't do that, and you are the next of kin and it hasn't been too long, you can search the death index for the year they died, then hunt around the local area to find which hospital they were announced dead at.

Answer 2

Find out where they died (by that I mean the town, city, county, state, etc).  You can then send for the death certificate, which usually has cause of death on it.  Every state has different laws about who can receive the death certificate, and what info is included if they do send you one.  Sometimes you can get one from the county or city as well.  You can also contact the local library or newspaper and see if there was an obituary or news article published about the deceased person.  Good luck!

Answer 3

"Good" and "Cheap" are usually mutually exclusive, unless you are talking about home-grown tomatos.

Missouri and West Virginia have some death certificates for some counties on-line for free. For the rest you would have to buy a copy of the death certificate from the state or county, at anywhere from $5 to $38 a pop. You may have to prove you are a direct descendant, too, thanks to identity theft rules.

Virtually all on-line "Death record" indexes on the web have name, date and place; some have maiden name or spouse. Virtually none have cause of death.

If you live in the area you can look up their obits in the microfilm at the public library. That would be free. The older ones sometimes mention cause. If something tragic happened - cholera or a fire sweeping through a house - there might be a news article instead of or in addition to an obit.

Once in a while the funeral home will have cause of death. If they do and the death is long enough ago they know you are not going to try to flim-flam the widow, they will tell you over the telephone.