Daisy Goddard
Researcher
Mon Apr 28 2025
•
< 5 minutes read
Death certificates provide crucial details about the final chapter of your ancestors’ life, from their next of kin to their final resting place. Learn how to find your relatives’ death record online and order a copy of their death certificate.
Where can I find death records?
Many British and Irish death records have been digitised and made accessible online, on family history websites like Findmypast. Rather than hunting in dusty archives, you can search handy indexes of these records wherever you are, on any device.
For hundreds of years, all deaths in Britain and Ireland have been recorded by both government and church administrators. This means that the death records available to search are split into civil death records and church burial records.
Civil death records
British and Irish governments have recorded deaths since the 19th century. For England and Wales, these records are held by the General Register Office (GRO). The indexes of these records have been digitised and made searchable online.
Church burial records
As the name suggests, these documents reveal when and where a person was buried. They span further back than civil death records – the Church of England began recording burials as early as 1538. These records are stored by local churches and archives but are increasingly being made available online.
What information do you need to find a death certificate?
Before searching death records online, it’s a good idea to gather all the information you know. The more you know, the easier it’ll be to find the record that you’re looking for.
Helpful details to note down are:
- Full name of the deceased
- Place of death (whether that’s a country, county, city or town)
- Age at death (if known)
- Their religious denomination (if any)
While facts like what church they belonged to or which parish they lived in will help you to narrow down your search, they’re not essential for finding a death certificate. A name and a date of death is enough to get started.
How to search death records
To easily find a person’s death record online, head to a family history website and find their civil or church death records. Add all the information you know – a name, date and location are a good start – and hit ‘search’.
Review your search results and try tweaking your search details if you can’t find the record you’re looking for.
To maximise your chances of success, try these top tips:
- Experiment with alternative spellings. Your ancestors’ name may be misspelled on their record or could’ve been changed in transcription.
- Cross-reference civil and church records. The record you’re looking for might sit within one collection and not the other, so be sure to cover all bases.
- Expand the search area. Is it possible your ancestor died somewhere different than you originally thought? Try broadening your search out to the county or even country level.
Ordering a death certificate
You don’t have to stop at finding an online death record. In the England and Wales, if you’d like a certified copy of a person’s death certificate, you can order one from the General Register Office (GRO).
You’ll be asked to provide the full name of the deceased, the date and place of their death, and the GRO index reference number of the record if you have it.
After paying a processing fee, you’ll get the death certificate sent to you by post or as a PDF via email.
Death certificates often contain more information than digitised death records. Ordering a certificate may also provide a way of accessing a record that you can’t find online – deepening your understanding and providing a solution to a pesky gap in your research.
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