If you haven’t seen the new website from Reclaim the records, you should check it out. It is easy to remember, www.newyorkdeathindex.com. This is something that the group has fought for since 2021. It is all the deaths in New York from 1880 to 1957; excluding New York City who has their own records. That amounts to over 10 million deaths.

Right on the homepage you can do a simple search using natural language. It then uses AI to do the search. It works sometimes and sometimes it gives odd results. I searched for “anyone who died in Rochester in 1880. It gave me 2 results; Frank Biere that died in Rochester and a James McDermott who when I clicked on the “right arrow” to see more details says he died in “Sheepshead [sic].”

Especially if you get to many results from the natural search you will want to do an “Advanced Search.” Before you even do an advanced search I must mention that after each search you should click on the “Clear” button just above the results listings or you will get some odd results on the second search.

The rest of this post is some tips and more odd things I have found.

On that advanced search page there are lots of fields that you can search on. I searched for just the first name “Thadius” and got lots of different spellings of that name. Un-check the check box below the “Given Name” box and it will just give the results for the exact spelling. You can also un-check the check box for surname if you only want one spelling and not soundalikes.

There is a search box for a calculated age at death. NY state only started putting age in their indexes in 1940 so that wouldn’t work for deaths before 1940.

You can search for year range of death or for a range of dates. You can also combine the range with a name search.

I couldn’t get the proper results when I searched for just a place of death. I tried Granger, Allegany County which is very small. When I typed “Granger” there was a pop-up that said there are only 587 records but then the results of the search showed over 370,000. Same thing happened when I tried to search only by residence; way to many results. It appears that the search results included people without a death location.

Once you get search results you can get more information by clicking on the “View (& right arrow)” button. That gives you more information on the location of death. Also you get 20 people with the same surname that died nearby. You can click on each of those people and see their data, etc. That page also has a graph of deaths in the location. Then way down on the bottom of the page is the exact data fields.

Go experiment with your searches, you can’t break the website. Remember to click the “Clear” button between searches.

More in Part 2.