Death Index
What is the Social Security Death Index and what kind of information can I find in it? The Social Security Death Index is an index of Social Security Death Benefit records. These records document how much the government has paid to an individual (spouse, child, etc) as a result of a relative's death. An individual will appear in the Social Security Death Index if he or she died between 1962 and 1988. In addition, the individual must have applied for Social Security during their lifetime, and someone must have applied for their Social Security death benefits at the time of death. You can find the following information in the Social Security Death Index: the deceased's surname and given name, Social Security number, birth date, death date, state and county code of last residence, zip code of residence, and zip code to which the Social Security Administration sent the death benefits.
A brief explanation of the American Soundex system follows, excerpted from Gary Mokotoff's page:
The American Soundex System
The soundex code consists of the first letter of the name followed by
three digits. These three digits are determined by dropping the letters
a, e, i, o, u, h, w and y and adding three digits from the remaining
letters of the name according to the table below. There are only two
additional rules. (1) If two or more consecutive letters have the same
code, they are coded as one letter. (2) If there are an insufficient
numbers of letters to make the three digits, the remaining digits are
set to zero.
1 b,f,p,v 2 c,g,j,k,q,s,x,z 3 d, t 4 l 5 m, n 6 rExamples:
Miller M460 Peterson P362 Peters P362 Auerbach A612 Uhrbach U612 Moskowitz M232 Moskovitz M213