I was reading Shaina Feinberg & Julia Rothman's excellent New York Times article "I Asked My Mom if She Was Prepared to Die." It had a lot of practical information on "getting ready for death," like making sure your financial accounts have other signatories, and reminding the survivors to order more death certificates than they think they'll need. Yes, you will need more than 10, trust me.
Which made me wonder - why can't we complete our death certificates with all that family information in advance? Granted, we don't know when or how we'll die, but most of us know our family information better than our significant other might.
A few years ago, after our father died, my brother completed the death certificate. Except...he listed the wrong state for where our grandmother was born. This error, though minor, will drive future genealogists nuts. I actually added a note to my Ancestry.com record for our father saying that his death certificate had this error.
Many decades ago, after my husband's grandfather died, his grandmother listed the wrong country for his birth. He was born in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, she listed his country of birth as Germany, since he came over speaking German when he was a boy. I added the same note to my grand-father-in-law's Ancestry record - wrong country on death certificate.
The notion of filling out a death certificate in advance may seem macabre but we all will need one some day. Collecting this information, which is later certified by a doctor or funeral home after death with information around a death, should be reasonably trivial due to the World Wide Web. Each state can set up the appropriate online death certificate online. I believe every state has a different death certificate format. Each person could set up a death certificate account for the state in which they live, fill it out with the accurate info while they're alive, and tell their next-of-kin that they have such an account and how to access it.
And even if this information can't be immediately imported into an actual death certificate, when the doctor/funeral home goes to complete it, they could have all the accurate information for that person readily available.
I tried to find out what a current state of Pennsylvania death certificate looks like. I could not find one at the Pennsylvania records Web site. I've seen recent Florida and Massachusetts death certificates, and many old death certificates as part of doing genealogical research. I understand the reluctance to not display an entire current death certificate online (fraud) but why not display the portions that could be completed before death?
Let's use the Web for some useful record-keeping for survivors' families by letting people partially complete the "life" part of their death certificate while they're still with us. It'll save their next-of-kin hassle when they have to complete someone else's death certificate.
