The NY Death Index website is actually made up of two databases; one first one has records 1880 – 1956 and the other from 1957 – 2017.

The older part of the database came about in a strange way. In 2017 Reclaim the Records were able to get copies of the paper vital records indexes from 1880 to 1956. They had filed a lawsuit to get them and were told no that they couldn’t have the copies. Ancestry.com filed a lawsuit afterwards and got the pages before Reclaim the Records. Ancestry must have said that they would make a computer database of the deaths for the Department of Health (DOH). Ancestry used OCR (or AI as everyone calls it now) to create the computer database that they have online. They DID give DOH their database so DOH no longer had to flip through a paper index to find a record. Because that database is part of DOH, Reclaim the Records was able to get that database to be included on this website. So the death indexes from 1880 to 1956 are originally from Ancestry. Those include misspellings and name field and location fields that were illegible.

Reclaim the Records says that “More than 52,000 records in this database have a partially illegible or completely missing surnames.” Also “More than 183,000 records in this database have a partially illegible or completely missing given name.” My great grandmother was in the database twice with alternate spellings of her given name (neither of which was the correct spelling).

The newer part of the database has deaths between 1957 and 2017. Those came from a database created by DOH. I imagine that they got a computer in 1957 and have been updating their index continuously since then. Those records have more data than the older deaths. As part of the lawsuit, Reclaim the Records MAY in the future get information after the DOH’s computer index file is reviewed by a Judge.

Deaths in New York City are supposed to be in the Vital Record Department of the City. But there are tens of thousand of records of deaths on the new website. The only thing that makes sense is the person resided in one place but died in another.

There are almost 21,000 people that died in a place that may be another state. A few are hard to determine as there are a Florida, Maryland, Alabama, etc. in New York State. So are they New York locations or the state? But what would explain 27 deaths recorded as happening in Nebraska and 19 in Idaho?

Up on the top of the web page in the menu bar is “Surnames” which shows the most common surnames in the death index. No really big surprises the top five are; Smith, Brown, Miller, Williams, and Johnson.

Hovering over “Locations” in the menu bar lets you pick a county. No surprise the most deaths in Monroe County are over a half million deaths in Rochester. But there are are also 3 deaths listed as in Sea Breeze and one in Seneca Park. There are some small places in Monroe County that I have no idea where they are.

If you want a bigger deep dive into how these death records got online, then click on “The Lawsuit” on the menu bar. See how the Department of Health fought to NOT have these released. In my opinion, their lawyer made some crazy arguments. And as I mentioned in Part 1 there may be some extra data on people in the index released in the future.

The website is still making improvements. That orange bar at the top of the page has a link to changes on the website. There have already been improvements since the official release of Dec. 3rd.

Notice also there is a “Donate” button for Reclaim the Records. They are still fighting for vital records from other states besides New York.

There is a Part 3, but I promise it will be short…