Social Security Death Index

(SSDI) is an invaluable tool for the genealogy aficionados. The SSDI is an extremely important database that contains all the critical data about mainly deceased Americans and indexes more than 79 million people (and growing) who have filed for their social security numbers and received benefits from the same and their deaths have been registered with the Social Security Administration or SSA.

The inaugural year for social security was 1935 and the first payments were given out after 1 Jan 1937. Thus you will be able to locate your relatives if any of your relatives died in 1937 and after. You can search a vast combination of data depending on the amount of data you already have you will be able to narrow down your search to just a few branches. The contents of the SSDI are as follows:
Name ( for females use maiden names and married names to make your search more relevant)
Date of Birth
Date of Death
Residence (this will give you zip code, city and county)
Last benefit received

Everyone who filed for social security had to fill an SS-5 form and thus you will be able to locate some basic information from it and for obtaining a copy you have to contact the SSA. One of the problems is that you must know the full name of the person you are searching for that the person had during death that is for women who are listed by their married names of their current marriage.

Also make sure that you write the person you are searching for is “DECEASED” and you can provide a printout from the Social Security Death Index as proof because if that is not the case and you are looking up a relative who is alive you must not only sign this form but also get it attested by two witnesses. Another reason is that the SSA might deny you the information if the death of your relative has not been registered on grounds of the Freedom of Information Act provisions for unwarranted invasion of privacy.

One of the best things that the SSDI search can give you is a cross checking benefit. You may have gone to a particular site to look up a social security number and then you can check the information you receive with the SSDI database again. So it is not just for double checking but in a few cases you might find that certain details like a birth date or just one of the numbers, either the day, month or year could be different and it could be error in the database or sometimes you might find alternative birthdates because of the sources might differ.

In fact you could also land up finding some other information that you haven’t seen listed anywhere before like an unknown spouse or child. Now though it is a rare occurrence but you must have patience and persistence and who knows what the results might yield.