GENDIS

Search Historical Death records now.

Overview. The Division of Vital Records and Health Statistics (DVRHS) provides Internet access to information from archived death records through the Genealogical Death Indexing System (GENDIS).  This system allows the user to search for records using key pieces of information such as the decedent's name, father's last name, and year of death.

The data originates from microfilmed death ledgers for Michigan; these historic death records were transcribed by genealogists from Michigan's local genealogical societies. Funding for the GENDIS project was provided by the Abrams Foundation to the Michigan Genealogical Council. By 2007, the Family Search collection had incorporated the records into its Michigan Online Genealogical Records website. In 2015, DVRHS merged the GENDIS data with computerized ledger files in an effort to produce a more complete list of names from the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s. The ledger files store administrative records used to locate certain vital records, they are incomplete in comparison to genealogical entries. The ledger records lack the cause of death, race, sex and other key pieces of information common to the original collection. The counts of records, by method of collection and year, are displayed in Table 1, below.

About the Data: The current system contains over 460,000 Michigan death records from 1867-1897. The counts by year (Table 1) indicate that GENDIS is mostly complete in comparison to the number of deaths reported by the Secretary of State during the same period, with the exception of 1893 (which is 42% complete). Table 2 displays the decedents' place of birth. The decedents during this time were mostly life-long Michiganders, but there was also a large immigrant community. Of those recorded in GENDIS, 75% were born in the United States. The vast majority of those were either born in Michigan or New York. Of those born outside the United States, 7% were born in the United Kingdom, 5.8% in the German Empire, 5.2% in Canada and the rest from a smattering of countries throughout the rest of the world. Between, 1860-1899, the most common last names were "Smith" and "Johnson." "John" and "William" were the most common male given names; the most common given female names were 'Mary", "Sarah" and "Elizabeth." (see Table 3, Table 4 and Table 5).

Searching GENDIS: General search tips are provided on the tips page. The user is reminded to start with very broad, generic queries first, and narrow the results down in subsequent requests. Generic requests would include the decedent's partial last name, truncated with an asterisk "*", the approximate years of death, and possibly a few letters of the decedent's first name. These sorts of generic searches help mitigate problems of missing data in the ledger files, a problem that exists mostly after 1885.

For more information: For requesting death or birth information for genealogical purposes, please contact the Michigan Vital Records & Health Statistics Division, Customer Request Unit by phone at (517) 335-8666 or by email at vrcustomerservice@michigan.gov.

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