Hon. John R. Gordner 
Senate District 27 
Senate Box 203027 
Harrisburg, PA 17120-3027 

Dear Hon. John R. Gordner 

I am writing to you concerning the accessibility of death certificates in the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

As an avid genealogist and family historian, I, along with many others, rely
on a variety of source documents to reconstruct family trees. One of the
documents of particular importance in this research is death certificates.
The information contained in death certificates such as the names of the
parents of the deceased person is invaluable and often cannot be found anywhere else.
 
Presently, all death certificates issued by the Department of Health of the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, regardless of the date of death, require the
knowledge of when and where the person died, the expenditure of $9 and a wait
of 5 weeks or longer for each and every death certificate. The many
burdensome restrictions make doing family history rather difficult and expensive.
 
Several states have already made their older death certificates available on-
line, including Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Utah and West Virginia.
Numerous other states have on-line indexes. But Pennsylvania has no index and
continues the outdated and costly manual processing of each death certificate
one at a time.
 
I understand the concerns about identity theft and privacy. However, there is
no practical reason to keep all of these records restricted from public
access indefinitely. Death certificates made accessible on the Internet could
be limited to only those at least 50 years old. Currently that would mean
only the death certificates of persons who died before 1957 would be made
accessible on-line. As each year passes the next year in line would be added
to this on-line database.
 
In the interest of providing considerably better service to the public,
allowing far greater use of these historic records by the public and the long-
run cost savings to the state, I request your help in making whatever changes
necessary in the law and the system to make the older death certificate
information available on the Internet. Several states have already taken this
action. Why not Pennsylvania?
 

Yours Truly