Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Wordless Wednesday: Documentation 2

Last week's picture documented the death of Porter Tirrill Dickie.
A death certificate is the document we most often discover first, say from a parent or grandparent.
Please note any differences of reported fact between death certificate and birth certificate. They can tell you a lot about the family.
The next generation normally fill out death certificates and frequently don't know necessary details about the decedent. In this case information was given by the subject's surviving son. But the birth certificate information was given by the father.
Note a small difference in the mother's name: Isabel/Isabella. Many women of this generation changed their given name later in life due to changes in American culture over those years. Isabella, born in the 1880s to parents born in the 1840s, decided she preferred Isabel when styles changed during the 1920s.