News from around the web.
Go to Source
—

One of the free resources we’ve recommended for years to search the online Social
Security Death Index (SSDI) has been taken offline.

RootsWeb’s SSDI database
is no longer available, with a message that

Due to sensitivities around the information in this database, the Social Security
Death Index collection is not available on our free Rootsweb service but is accessible
to search on Ancestry.com.

The SSDI is a database of deaths reported to the Social Security Administration, for
the most part since 1962. A subscription is required to use Ancestry.com’s
version of the SSDI, and genealogists including Randy
Seaver and Sheri Fenley report
that Social Security numbers aren’t provided for deaths within the past 10 years.

You might think genealogists wouldn’t be concerned with such a recent death, but someone
who died in 2002 might’ve been born in 1920, and his or her application for an SSN
(called an SS-5) could name parents born in the 1800s. Plus, the SSDI is useful for
tracing family lines forward in time to find distant cousins.

Randy
lists other sources of the SSDI, which include the free
FamilySearch site.

If you don’t have a deceased person’s SSN, you still can request his or her SS-5.
You’ll need to provide a birth date, any other names the person used, and the parents’
names, and pay $29 instead of $27. You
now can request an SS-5 online.

The “sensitivities” RootsWeb refers to are likely related to a recent news story about criminals
using SSNs of deceased individuals to commit tax fraud. (Couldn’t the IRS prevent
this by comparing SSNs on tax forms to numbers in the SSDI?)

Read
more on recent SSDI changes, which include a reduction in the number of new deaths
that’ll be included in this database, here.