[WikiEN-l] Looking up death dates in government death

[Gwern Branwen]

Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> writes:

> On 5/1/07, Rob <gamaliel8 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The real point should be if you have to rely on the Social 
   Security
>> Death Index to tell you if someone is even alive or dead, you 
   might
>> want to consider that you don't have enough reliable sources 
   for an
>> article on that person.
>
> I could imagine lots of situations where a person's life was 
  closely
> followed during a certain period, and then the person dropped 
  into
> obscurity, to the point where no one in the media even noticed 
  his/her
> death.
....
> Anthony

Absolutely. I think we've all worked on at least one such article; 
purely off the top of my head I can remember [[Guillermo 
Hernández-Cartaya]]. I wanted to use the DOJ's biographical 
information to put his death sometime in the '90s, but that didn't 
seem kosher at the time.

-- 
Gwern
Inquiring minds want to know.