Cliff has given me permission to repeat his post to the NY-Westchester County mailing list. This is really informative. Since the online Social Security Death Indexes were mentioned about a week ago, I have written a webpage analyzing the ones that I found. There are six versions available, none of them by the Social Security Administration. I spent a day comparing them. In the final analysis, the RootsWeb SSDI is slightly more accurate the other, and it is kept up-to-date. I like Family Tree Legends almost as much, but it is missing the last two and half years of information. It supplies the age at death that none of the other SSDI websites have. There is a problem on all of the SSDI sites concerning the accuracy of reporting the Last Known Residence. In the SSDI information supplied by the Social Security Administration, only a zip code is given for Last Known Residence. Various SSDI sites take the zip code and try to convert it into a location. A zip code area might include several hamlets, a village or two, and much rural area that could only be described as being in a certain Township or Town. All but one SSDI website list only a single location for that entire zip code area. That means that a wrong last residence is listed for a large percentage of the people present in the Social Security Death Indexes found online. And that leads to wrong information in our genealogical records. The least accurate is the Family Search (Latter Day Saints) site. This is due to a label which is meant to apply to more than one situation, but when faced with the most common situation, the label is misleading. The six websites are all different. Some have features that the others lack. Stephen P. Morse has developed some marvelous software that allows searches of the six SSDI sites all at once in such a way that using his search form will allow a person to do searches not allowed on the six sites individually. For example, if you don't know when the person died, he allows a search using a range of years of possible death. The data that gets displayed looks like that of RootsWeb, but also includes the age at death, a nice feature which was not supplied by the Social Security Administration. The Social Security Administration sells the data to these SSDI websites, including the Social Security numbers. If they were concerned about the SS numbers of dead people being published, they wouldn't sell the information. To learn about how the USA Patriot Act plays a role in the availability of this information, view my webpage. http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~clifflamere/Aid/AID-SocSecDI.htm Cliff Lamere -- Pat Connors, Sacramento CA http://www.connorsgenealogy.com