Linda, Stories like yours are helping to convince me that my four sources will top the death certificate. I will of course keep the death cert. date and cite it. The funny thing is, the place of death is 100 miles from his home. I don't know how that contributes to the misinformation. The death certificate also gives his time of death as 6 am. A funeral director emailed me privately and said that often the date of death will show up incorrectly when it's in the middle of the night. It may well be the case that this man was found dead when he didn't show up for breakfast or whatever and the cororner assumed that date and someone else assumed the day before. I guess I'll never really know, since it was 1884! Thanks, Doris -- BradLin000@aol.com wrote: "How likely is it that a date of death might be wrong on a death certificate?" Hi Doris, Any death certificate can have misinformation in it. My grandfather's death certificate has his father's name wrong. My step grandmother gave his brother's name instead of his father's...Charles B. instead of Charles H. Since my Great Grandfather was called by his middle name and people remembered him we knew she was wrong. All the other documents have him listed as Charles H. She was put in a nursing home not very long after that for senile dementia. My father's death certificate is also wrong. He was cremated in Haverhill, MA and the ashes buried in South Chelmsford, MA. The death certificate states that he is buried in Haverhill because the crematorium filled it out...even though they knew he was going to be buried in South Chelmsford. When we tried to change it, the procedure was pretty much going to take an act of the legislature so we dropped it. We also have a problem with the location of the cemetery. The USGIS lists the Hart (Heart aka Baptist) Pond Cemetery as being in Westford, MA. Funny, I grew up in So. Chelmsford about a mile away from that cemetery and it was always in So. Chelmsford. All my family is buried there and that is where I'll be...and I don't plan on being in Westford. I talked to someone at GIS and he got very snippy, insisting that it was entirely in Westford. That means that the town lines are wrong and most of So. Chelmsford doesn't exist. Sigh! Someone looking for this cemetery, not familiar with the area, would go to Westford and they wouldn't have it listed in the town hall. They would send them to the Chelmsford Town Hall who would send them back to So. Chelmsford. A lot of wasted time when you are not from the area and time is important. I guess the bottom line is the more documentation you have and the more sources for the same information the better off you are. If you think your ancestors are from a certain area, don't restrict yourself to one little location; spread out a little. Boundaries had a habit of changing and sometimes changing over and over. The funny thing is that Westford was originally part of Chelmsford until the 1700's. Linda Bee ==== ILROOTS Mailing List ==== There are TWO list archives, searchable two different ways. http://searches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/listsearch.pl?list=ILROOTS-L http://archiver.rootsweb.com/ILROOTS-L/ ============================== Search the US Census Collection. Over 140 million records added in the last 12 months. Largest online collection in the world. Learn more: http://www.ancestry.com/s13965/rd.ashx