I Hope This Wasn’t Your Relative

The title of this blog post goes out to all genealogists.

I was recently looking for a death certificate that had been indexed online, but the certificates on film were not in order, so I had to look through many of them to find the one I wanted. I happened past this very sad death certificate. How many people are we looking for that could possibly have ended up with a record like this?

Unknown Person. Would this say John Doe in a more recent time period?

The URL of this post is http://idogenealogy.com/2013/03/17/i-hope-this-wasnt-your-relative/.

4 thoughts on “I Hope This Wasn’t Your Relative”

  1. I have one almost similar. But fortunately it DOES have his name on it, but thats all it has. Unknown bdate, unknown parents, unknown anything. It is sad when people go out of this life with no one beside them, or to stand up for them.

    1. I have seen various states of unknown information on deaths. I can’t remember specifically if I’ve seen one like yours, where they knew the name and nothing else. But at least there was a name, so someone had an idea who he was. But the amount of information depends on the informant, which is sometimes just the hospital staff. That’s not to say there wasn’t someone with them, or maybe it was a child or grandchild who didn’t know the birth info or parents.

  2. In the Lutheran parish records for Dunesdorf (Daneş, Mureș, Romania), a 55 year old nameless man was buried in January 1871. (Civil registration in this region didn’t start for another decade or more). He had been found near the road outside of town, dead of unknown causes, and was unknown to the local residents. I have wondered if he had family somewhere that never knew what happened to him.

  3. Death certificate from Nürnberg, Germany, February 1965: A body of a dead unknown baby, age 3 to 4 months, was found 20 m from the bank of the lake on the ice…

    But my personal “favourite” is a death certificate from the same city, some time in 1943: A young lady, married for approximately 8 months, commited suicide, after they announced her that her husband was KIA in Russia.

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