Are death certificates allowed to be posted as pdf, jpeg?

Question

I have learned a great deal about my family's medical history through death certificates. Would it be too morbid or contrary to policy to upload death certificates as a source (PDF, JPEG files)? Or perhaps for members to use for their own family medical history?

Answer 1

Not at all!

There's always the privacy options to consider, if you don't believe they should be for public viewing. I believe that information from a death certificate would be a wonderful source document.

Comments

Oh - and JPG would be better. PDF shows up as a generic icon on the profiles. It can be opened, but you can't see it without opening it.

Answer 2

I expect that you will get a wide variety of opinions on this, but I have posted a few death certificates to profiles that I ordered and are not available anyplace else.

For example, I ordered this 1904 death record from the State of Illinois for my great-great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth (Ballou) Jones.  There are several important details on this record that make having access to the actual copy an asset for anyone interested in studying her:

 http://www.wikitree.com/photo/jpg/Ballou-103

There is debate over whether images of death certificates from genealogy sites should be posted here - particularly if the genealogy site has a restrictive term-of-service.  You can search g2g for other threads on this topic if you want to read the g2g debates on this from the past.

Answer 3

I definitely wouldn't put any English ones here. The image (not the data on it), is, I believe, subject to Crown Copyright.