The New York State Death Index
Search For Death Records in New York
Try a natural language search! Some examples:
- →"John Smith from Buffalo who died in the early 1930s"
- →"anyone that died in Yonkers on June 8, 1926"
- →"people with the surname Stein who died near Liberty in the Fifties"
- →"Hannah Jones who died in Nassau County"
The story of freeing 10 and a half million records...and more data fields potentially still to come
The New York State Death Index was not freely available to the public until we fought for it.
Reclaim The Records is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to liberating historical and genealogical records from government archives, agencies, and libraries — and making them freely available to the public. We use state and federal Freedom of Information laws to acquire records that should already be public, and then we publish them online without paywalls, restrictions, or gatekeepers. When agencies refuse our requests, we sue them.
In November 2021, we filed a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request with the New York State Department of Health, asking them for a copy of the data you see on this website: the text index to over ten and a half million New York State death records, spanning over three centuries of New York's history.
The Department of Health denied our request in February 2022, claiming vague privacy concerns for dead people (?!) and arguing that the records were exempt from disclosure. But we knew these historical records belonged to the public. Death records have been considered public information for generations, used by genealogists, historians, journalists, and researchers. Many states already make similar historical death data freely available online, including all of New York's neighboring states. But New York was an outlier, keeping this valuable historical information locked away from the public to whom it rightfully belongs.
So we sued the state. After years of litigation, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled in our favor in May 2025, ordering the Department of Health to release the death index records to the public. The Court recognized that these historical records serve the public interest and that FOIL's transparency requirements apply to this data.
This website is the result of that victory. The data is now freely searchable, downloadable, and usable by anyone — no restrictions, no paywalls, no gatekeepers. And we're not done yet with our court case, continuing to push for the disclosure of even more data fields to enhance the available public information about our history. Learn all about our court case, and the latest news in our ongoing fight to release all the public data back to the public.
Key Legal Documents
Article 78 Petition
July 21, 2021
Our formal legal petition filed in New York State Supreme Court to compel the release of the death index records under FOIL.
"DOH has no legal basis to restrict access to New York State death indexes. As a New York agency, DOH had the burden of demonstrating with specificity why production was exempted under FOIL, but it failed to meet its burden."
Court of Appeals Decision
May 25, 2025
The final decision from the New York State Court of Appeals, ruling in our favor and ordering the release of the death index records.
"We agree with petitioner that DOH must disclose for those years the same fields of information that are already part of the online database... As to deaths from 1973 to 2017, DOH has not shown that any exemption applies... and it must therefore provide those records to petitioner."
