marguerite Sykes's Page

Hi Marguerite, In addition to your husband's testing at 23andMe it would be a good idea for him to get Y-chromosome DNA testing done at Family Tree DNA so that he can look for matches with different surnames. You can't use the 23andMe test for genealogical matching on the surname line. Ideally your husband would need to test at least 37 markers. He can test through the adopted project:

http://www.familytreedna.com/public/adopted/

It might be best to wait for the FTDNA summer sale which should be at the end of June. He would then also be able to join the haplogroup N1c1 project:

http://www.familytreedna.com/public/N1c1/

Best wishes

Debbie

New Mexico death records:  http://www.vitalrecordsnm.org/death.shtml

Marguerite, regarding the more recent deaths.  Even if a state's death certificates do appear somewhere online, they will probably not include anything more recent than about 50 years, due to privacy concerns.  For these more recent deaths, It's possible that to get a copy of the certificate you may have to prove your relationship to the deceased.  You'd have to check with whichever agency holds the certificates.  In some states, that is the state, in others it is the county.

There could be several reasons.  Two that I can think of are:  1) LDS hasn't yet put all their records online.  They're working on it, but it will take a long time.  2)  The state of New Mexico won't let LDS put the data on line.  The individual states usually hold the copyrights to these kind of data, including indexes, and so LDS must have their permission to index and publish the records.

Have you tried googling "New Mexico Death Records" to see if the state itself has either put them online or at least has a way for you to obtain the record.  Many states use birth, marriage, and death certificates as revenue producers and won't give them away for free.

Marguerite,

     I just checked familysearch and found Louise Karkutt's death indexed there, and the source is indicated as the index to Illinois Stillbirths and deaths, film # 1643651.  Checking the film #, I found that the index is online and then was able to find it.  See http://www.ilsos.gov/isavital/idphdeathsrch.jsp .  It does not appear that Illinois' death certificates are available for free anywhere, so after using the search routine, you'll need to click on the line about obtaining certificates for dates after 1915.  I put Louise's name into the search routine and found her death certificate info.  The 0160190 number is the death certificate number.