Re: Older Pennsylvania Death Certificate Accessibility
 

As you may already know, all death certificates recorded by the Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania since 1906 have restricted access regardless of how long ago
a person died. A requester is required to supply when and where the person
died, spend $9 and wait 5 weeks or longer for each and every death
certificate. And many of us have experienced the frustration of either being 
told the death certificate couldn’t be found or being sent the wrong
certificate. Because of the many burdensome restrictions, the public is not
able to use these historic records as much as they should be able to.
 
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continues the outdated and costly manual processing of each death certificate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 privacy and identity theft. However, there is
no practical reason to keep all of these records restricted indefinitely.
Therefore, my basic proposal is that the death certificates that would be
accessible on-line would have to be at least 50 years old. Currently that 
would mean only 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. 

The Social Security Death Master File (with names, dates, places and numbers),
which is updated quarterly, is an identity verification database used to
thwart identity theft and fraud. Expanding the proposed database to include
all death records (but with the same limited public access as outlined above)
could be used in a similar manner by law enforcement and government agencies.
The Division of Vital Records would itself be able to use the same database
to fill requests.
 
While there would be some start up costs I believe the Commonwealth would save
money in the long run, the public would be much better served and easier
access would allow far greater use of these historic records by the public
than is possible with the current system.
 
Please help in doing whatever is necessary to change the laws and the system
to allow greater access to these historic records and have them available on-
line.
 
Sincerely