For questions about documents pertaining to a person's death, including death certificates, registers and indexes.
Use death-records on questions pertaining to research using death records, such as locating or interpreting an ancestor's death certificate.
For questions about locating multiple types of records in a certain time and place, such as birth, marriage and death records, use the tag vital-records rather than tagging each record type individually.
Death records are considered to be the primary source for finding a date and place of death. Before government registration of deaths began, in many places there were simply no records of deaths per se. For example, civil registration began in England in 1837, and in the United States the availability of death certificates varies greatly by state and city. Before death records were systematically recorded by governments, to research further back one must often rely on proxy records such as burial records, gravestones, or obituaries. For questions about such sources use the relevant tag: burial-records, grave-marker, or obituary.
