[WikiEN-l] Looking up death dates in government death records: original research?

[Ray Saintonge]

Sam Blacketer wrote:

>On 4/30/07, Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>2) Are such lookups in SSDI legitimate sourcing for articles, or are
>>they original research?  I incline towards the latter, since there is
>>a leap between getting a name and making the decision that it is the
>>same person that feels like more of one than we should be making
>>without support from a source.
>>    
>>
>I would have thought that it is original research. The SSDI is by
>definition a primary source; the fact that it happens to be fairly
>easily available does not make it a 'published' source. Identifying
>someone in the index by reference to their name and other known facts
>(eg residence and birth date) is going into the primary sources to do
>your own research.
>
It is available on line as well as in CDs.  How is that not "published"?

>Put it like this - if someone in there is notable, then their death
>would have been noticed (from the SSDI at the very least) by some
>proper secondary source.
>
Not necessarily.  I'm sure that there would be no difficulty in finding 
notable people who lived on 20 years or more after what made them 
notable, but whose death was totally ignored.

Ec