On the other side of the coin, death certificates can be quite helpful. We
tried for years to find when and where one of my great-grandfathers died. We
knew his wife remarried sometime after his death but were unable to find out
when that was. Once I obtained a copy of HER death certificate the pieces
all fell into place. On her's it said she had lived at that location for 51
years which meant she and her husband had moved there before the birth of
their last two children and that meant he was still alive as of 1910. A
check of the records for the cemetary where she was born turned up a burial
record for him and that was enough to get his death certificate, too. The
parents names on it were wrong but they were at least close enough to
confirm that the people 6 months of research said they were was correct.
Also, her date of death was enough to track down an obituary which, while it
had nothing about my great-grandfather, mentioned the full name of her
second husband, something else we hadn't known since we only knew she had
remarried from a late photo of her that was captioned, and that he had died
12 years before her.
There were some errors on Great-grandma's DC but there was also a lot of
very helpful information. I guess you just take the bad with the good. I try
to remember that all of that information was provided by the living and that
their memory can be faulty. Shoot, when my father died in 1992, I was wrong
about his mother's maiden name. Fortunately my sister knew what it really
was and between all four of us kids we know that one is accurate. And
knowing his mother's correct maiden name cleared up a minor mystery for me.
One of the few momentos I have from from my childhood is a birthday card
from my second birthday that says "from great-grandma Ida Lewis." I didn't
know who that was until I found out my dad's mother's maiden name was Lewis.
Richard