Deep Roots Family Tree Blog

Research advice

I love death certificates. I know that sounds strange, but they are my one of my favorite documents to find. If filled out correctly, they are a fountain of knowledge, often giving you the birth date, death date, spouse, and parents of an individual. Sometimes even a cause of death and occupation. The death certificate below is for my great-grandfather, Peter Misemer. It tells us that he was born on July 3rd, 1891 to Henry M. Misemer (still verifying this) and Mary Smith. He married Betsy Moe. His date of death was July 20th 1934 after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage, and he was working on the Great Northern Railway at the time. He was 43 years old when he died. I do have a copy of the death certificate that shows the cause of death. Requesting death records from North Dakota is surprisingly easy.

I’m nosey. I like to know how someone died, which is pushing more towards the specialty of forensic genealogy and health genealogy. A lot of times you can go back through a family tree and find how something such as Alzheimer’s or cardiac issues are passed down.

But on ancestry.com, 99% of the time, the cause of death is obscured.

Above is my grandfather, Arthur Misemer’s death certificate where the cause of death is censored. I was taking a really good look at the document one day and noticed the numbers written above the “cause of death” box on the left bottom of it. I work in mental health and spend some time reviewing charts, so diagnosis codes are not foreign to me. I searched “162.9 diagnosis” on Google and found that is corresponded with “malignant neoplasm of the bronchus and lunch that is unspecified”. Lung cancer. A disease that also took his wife many years later. Both were smokers.

So that is my advice. Look at your documents. Really look at them. Look at and scrutinize everything. You never know what you’re going to find.