November 14, 2025

As I discussed last week, birth and death certificates are among the most valuable genealogical records. However, these records are not available for many of our ancestors. If birth and death certificates don’t exist or are sealed, what can a genealogist use to fill in the blanks? Fortunately, substitutes for birth and death certificates exist.

 

Church records are some of the best vital records substitutes. Like birth and death certificates, baptismal and death records were made at the time of an event which usually makes them more accurate. In addition, most of our ancestors were church members. Many church records have been digitized and can be found on websites such as Ancestry and Family Search. For example, Ancestry has digitized copies of original Quaker records.

 

It’s important to remember that churches often recorded the date of a person’s baptism or burial, not the birth date or death date. For obvious reasons, burial dates and death dates were not very far apart. However, baptismal dates varied depending on whether the church practiced infant baptism or baptism later in life. A baptismal or funeral date is usually not the actual birth or death date.

 

Obituaries and cemetery records can also provide birth and death information. These records are typically more accurate for death dates than birth dates. That’s because the person giving the information is often a child or grandchild. They were obviously not alive when the person being buried was born. Obituaries were published around the time of the death – not two years earlier or later. The exact date of death may be off by a few days, however.

 

Wills and probate packages don’t usually list birth dates, but they do often list death dates. Even if they don’t give the exact date of death, the date that the probate was filed in court can be helpful in narrowing the date of death to a specific time frame.

 

Censuses are often used as vital record substitutes, but they should be used with care. Censuses are notoriously error prone. The census taker may have miswritten the information he was given. A person may have lied about his/her age. The census taker sometimes interviewed neighbors about a family if the family was not at home. Neighbors may or may not have known how old someone was.

 

Censuses can be used to get a general sense of when someone was born. This works best if the data from multiple censuses for the same person is compared. If the ages listed are consistent, the information is more likely to be accurate.

 

Military records such as pension files and draft registration cards can also be useful in providing vital record information.

 

Many of us assume that the only way to find an accurate birth or death date for an ancestor is through birth and death certificates. While these records are important, there are many other records that can provide this information. Don’t overlook them.

 

Carol Stetser

Researcher

Larimer County Genealogical Society