After years of thinking about it, I finally ordered and received my Grandpa Phil’s death certificate last week and goodness was that exciting!

Funny, isn’t it, how excited we can get about documenting our ancestors…

Seeing the details in black and white…

Reflecting on the circumstances that led up to that final moment…

Contemplating all that came before and all that transpired after?

See, my maternal Grandfather, Phil, passed away five years before I was born so he has only ever existed within my imagination based on the stories I was told about him as I was growing up. Luckily, there were lots of stories.

He was an amazing character, a record producer and artist, who died in Brooklyn in 1971 at only 59 years old. He was born in Joplin, Missouri but lived all over the country, from LA to Chicago to New York City, with several stop-overs in between.

Trust me, I’ll write a whole blog post devoted to him like I did for Hannah, but since I’m in the currently sitting in the Vortex of Vital Records Joy, I want to talk a little bit about what I learned from that simple piece of paper and what questions still remain.

While I’ve thought about it in the past, truth be told, it was my post, How to Document the Undocumented, that was the catalyst for ordering Phil’s Death Certificate because while I have a lot of oral history surrounding his death, I wanted to see the actual document.

I also wanted to see if he had been buried or if he, like my Grandma and all of his children, had been cremated.

So, what we’re questions I had that were confirmed on this death certificate?

• Grandpa Phil did, in fact, die on his 59th birthday as my mom always said he’d aimed to.

• Grandpa Phil was not cremated, but was buried at a tiny cemetery in the town of Somer, New York.

• Happily, Phil’s parents and his social security number were confirmed and a new-to-me Brooklyn address has been added to my list to research.

But also! This death certificate raised a couple of questions! Because, of course it did ;-) For example:

• Phil’s cause of death is listed as “natural causes”, but there are no further details provided as I’ve found on many other death certificates. He spent ~5 weeks in the hospital before his death and I was always told he had lung cancer (yes, he was a lifelong smoker, never not without a cigarette in hand, just as in the above photo) so it’s curious to me that no further details were provided.

• The cemetery he was buried in makes no sense to me unless it is in the town the family lived in for a short time when my mom and her siblings were young, but I never thought to ask the name of the town. Additionally, I cannot find any record of his burial there…but it’s a tiny cemetery so the online records are incomplete. I’ve put a call in to them and hope to hear back soon.

And so the research continues!

In the meantime, I’m pleased to have added one more document to my files and am inspired to keep plugging away at acquiring vital records as I can. It’s not a quick or cheap process, but the wait and the cost are well worth it in the end.

Do tell, have you come across vital records that raise more questions for you than you originally had?

Onward,

Melis