Ancestry.com recently announced that “New York State, Death Index, 1957-1968” had been released on their site. This compliments “New York, Death Index, 1880-1956” that has been on their site for some time.

These are indexes only but they do facilitate the use of these records.

These two separate databases can be searched by name, date, and location or can be browsed by year of death. The general warnings apply:

• names can be spelled or transcribed incorrectly
• the person may not have died where you think they did
• the year of death you have may not be the correct one

These indexes facilitate the finding of the actual record and are much better than what we had before. I’ve already found my children’s French-Canadian ancestors in the index.