Gender: Male

Age at death: 72-year-old

Occupation: Farmer

Cause of death: Cerebral hemorrhage

Claim to fame: Brother to Jesse James

This is what shows on the 1915 death certificate of Alexander Franklin James — a.k.a. Frank James – okay so not the “claim to fame part” – and is just one of the 640,000 imaged death records through 1924 that now can be found online through the Missouri State Archives in the secretary of state’s office.

An ambitious program, this agency has created an online index of 2 million Missouri death certificates from 1910 to 1955. The basic information for each death is online now, with the actual images of the death certificates not expected to be online for several years.

Why now?

These records have always been maintained by the Department of Health and Senior Services.  But a law requiring records older than 50 years to be transferring to the state archives was passed in 2004 pushed the state to move these hard copy records online. 

This database allows anyone to search for a person by name, county, or month and year of death. The agency is gradually adding images of individual death certificates.  It has been through the efforts of hundreds of volunteers — across the US and in other countries — that this project has come to fruition.

Who cares about death records?

It has been a valuable tool for state archives historians. They noted the spike in recorded deaths in 1918, when an influenza epidemic swept the country, and came across records documenting the deaths in 1927 of children killed when tornadoes hit schools in St. Louis.

But the database’s real value has been for people researching their ancestors, said Ken Winn, the state’s archivist.

“We knew this would be popular, but it never occurred to me it would be this popular,” Winn said. “The response has been overwhelming.”

When the database went online on April 6, the number of searches on the Web site overloaded the agency’s computers, slowing them to a crawl, he said.

Within five weeks, he said, there were a million searches.

Winn said that at the agency’s current rate, images for all death certificates through 1955 should be online by 2009. However, Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, genealogists and a few lawmakers have expressed support for hiring more staff and buying more document scanning equipment to help expedite that timing.