What information is on a UK death certificate?
I just wanted to quickly write about what details are on a death certificate in the UK. It’s something that has come up a few times over the last couple of weeks and it can be a really important document to help you when you are searching for living relatives as well as closing the door on a search when someone has sadly passed away.
So let’s go straight into what is contained within the death certificate and from there I’ll tell you how we would use that information to advance a search.
A full death record will give you:
• The persons full name
• The date of death
• The place of death
• The persons date and place of birth.
• Occupation.
• Their address.
• A cause of death.
• And the informant of the death. I.e. the person who gave the information for the death registration. This would usually be a next of kin or close family member.https://relativeconnections.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/UK-death-certificate.png
As you can see there is a lot of information contained within a Death certificate but how can it be used to help with a search.
Clearly if you are looking for someone and you have their birth date and full name, then you order the death certificate and you get a match the person you are looking for has passed away. This can actually be done without the death certificate via the death record. We would always order the certificate for our customer so they could get the additional information. Cause of death for example is good to know if you are looking for a biological parent. Further to this though is the other information contained within the certificate. If you were looking for someone you had never met then the informant of the death, usually a close family member can open doors to meeting other relatives. We have put a lot of siblings together in this way. One sibling comes to us to find a biological parent, we find out that they have very sadly passed away but then trace a living relative and put families back together in that way too.
Sometimes we have three or four potential matches for someone we are looking for. This is especially true when we are looking for people with names such as John Smith or Stephen Jones. Without wishes to cause offence these names are particularly common and it can be hard to identify an exact match. By ordering a death certificate for a potential match we can actually discount them from the investigation based on the birth date or place of birth for example.
Many people who come to us have limited information about the person they are looking for. Sometimes they know that the person was an engineer or owned a shop. Again this is information that is on the death certificate so that can be really useful too.
As you can see there is a lot of information contained within the death certificate that can be used in many different ways.
I hope this short guide has helped you to find out what information is on a death certificate in the UK?