I stumbled into this without thinking about what it would entail. My mother once said that she had a miscarriage before I was born. That would have been sometime in the late 1940s.

I asked about those kinds of records on the NY Genealogy group. I got replies from both Brooke Schreier Ganz and Alec Ferretti of Reclaim the Records. Both stated that when they asked for the NY Death Index that they did not want those records. Alex also stated that there is probably a completely separate index to miscarriages and still births.

I found this web page from the NY Department of Health. They have two classes on that web page; Fetal Death (miscarriage) and Still Birth. They say that “A still birth is the death of a fetus after 20 weeks of gestation.” That would be the current standard. In the past that time period could have been less or greater.

The Dept. of Health has different standards for who can order the records. For the Fetal Death Certificate only the mother can order a copy of the certificate. For the Still Birth either parent can order the certificate or if both parents are deceased then a grandparent or sibling could submit an order but they have to certified that both parents are deceased.

One genealogical researcher says that she has found some stillbirths in the birth and/or death indexes that are currently available online from various sources. I would imagine that those came about because, in the past, a doctor filed a standard death certificate instead of a special one that should have been filed for a still birth.

I did a search on the new Reclaim the Records The New York State Death Index web page but just putting “SB” in the first name field. I got about 250 records with “SB” as a first name and another 300 records had a child with a first name plus “SB.”

There are a couple of states that have made their still birth index available but I doubt that New York State will ever make this special index available. In part because  a small percentage of these records could include abortions which for the most part were historically illegal but could have been done to protect the health of the mother.