Dead or alive: how to find this out online?

Factual Questions
1

Strange as this sounds, I need to find out whether my great-aunt is dead or not. My mother seems to have lost track of her and now I’m consumed with the desire to find out whether she’s alive.

I’ve hit a number of sites that will give me basic information on death records, but want me to fork over dough for more details. The trouble is that my great-aunt has a very common name (both first and last), so even when I narrow it down to the state where she last lived, there are multiple potential hits.

The Maryland vital records division lets you get copies of death certificates for $12, but I’m not certain she’s dead, and if she is dead, I’m not 100% sure she died in Maryland.

Any thoughts on how to figure this out?

2

You can look it up on the Social Security Death Index (SSDI). Here’s a link (it’s at Rootsweb). I can’t seem to find this at the SSA website.

3

Some other good sources of death information:

http://home.att.net/~wee-monster/deathrecords.html

http://www.vitalrec.com/

http://www.obitcentral.com/obitsearch/obit-grabbag.htm

http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/obits/obitsmd.htm

Social Security is pretty good, but their records are not complete or up to date. If you think you know where she died, you can always try contacting the local paper and asking about obituaries.

Have you tried calling Maryland vital records? I recently had to get a death certificate in another state under similar circumstances. Once I found the last known address, I called the vital records people and had them verify that they had a record of the death, and then sent them the fee for the death certificate.

4

The Social Security Death Index is a commercial version of what the Social Security Administration calls its Death Master File. It cannot be found at the SSA website.

The version of the Social Security Death Index at Ancestry.com is updated monthly. Currently it includes deaths through November 2004. These days, more than 95% of all deaths in the U.S. are recorded in the SSDI. For example, the SSDI contains 2.32 million deaths for 2002; there were 2.44 million deaths in the United States that year.

5

Thanks for the hits, guys. Sadly, I think she may be dead (I found a likely-looking match in the SSDI) so I think my next step is the newspapers.