If news of your death is greatly exaggerated, it’s hell on your credit.

August 13, 2015 8:30 AM

Paul Ford (MeFi's Own) looks through the Social Security Death Master File, the federal government's list of U.S. citizens who have died since the creation of Social Security in 1935. (NOTE: Not everyone on the list has actually died. Also, not everyone who has died in on the list.) You can explore the database yourself: The Database of the Dead -- Are You in It?
posted by Cash4Lead (30 comments total)

I have a very uncommon combination of given name and surname and I'm not on the list. I did find that women with my given name die on average a couple of years older than I currently am. (I did find my dad, who also has the common surname, and his information appears to be right, which is good since he died almost 30 years ago.)
posted by immlass at 8:49 AM on August 13, 2015

Paul Ford is a contributing editor for The New Republic. His book about Web pages will be published in 2016 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Now there's a book I'm looking forward to.

My father came up when I entered his name, which is natural but also a little creepy. Death is, let's face it, a little creepy.
posted by languagehat at 9:05 AM on August 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

Hm. I've died once. I was 75, in 1987.
posted by wallabear at 9:20 AM on August 13, 2015

Yike! Apparently my dad is still alive, even though I scattered his ashes only last weekend.
posted by wallabear at 9:22 AM on August 13, 2015

No one with my name has died since 2013. LOOKS LIKE WE'RE DUE *pulls plastic bag over head*
posted by infinitewindow at 9:23 AM on August 13, 2015 [4 favorites]

Jeez. I'm not dead? This explains so much, you guys.
posted by town of cats at 9:32 AM on August 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yike! Apparently my dad is still alive, even though I scattered his ashes only last weekend.

As Paul explains, he got the data from Cancel These Funerals, which notes that, as of March 2014, information isn't published until three years after the person dies. So it's not up to date.
posted by Cash4Lead at 9:37 AM on August 13, 2015

5 people with my name have died. The youngest was 72 and the oldest was 95. Two were in their 70s, one in her late 80s, and two in their 90s. My name is corollates with longevity!
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:37 AM on August 13, 2015

Cash4Lead, I understand that. He passed in 2011, and they haven't gotten to him yet.
posted by wallabear at 9:49 AM on August 13, 2015

Looked for my mom. Yep, she's there. Although her date of death is one day later than the actual one, for some reason.
posted by mykescipark at 9:53 AM on August 13, 2015

TOTAL DEATHS: 18.
Goddamn, I'm wily.
posted by Iris Gambol at 9:54 AM on August 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

No deaths found for my combination of Firstname Lastname, but the average age of death for people sharing each individual name was 45 and 59 (yikes!)
posted by twoporedomain at 10:04 AM on August 13, 2015

12 people with my name have died. Which is mostly disturbing because when I once searched for people in the U.S. with my name, I found six including myself.
posted by ardgedee at 10:10 AM on August 13, 2015

Even after you're dead, Big Data knows where you are and what you're doing.
posted by briank at 10:13 AM on August 13, 2015

Y'all with your unusual names. Six people with my name died in April 2013, and judging from the shape of the graph, I'm going to guess that at best, 50% of deaths are in the database for 2013.
posted by wotsac at 10:17 AM on August 13, 2015

uh oh rabbit hole
posted by janey47 at 10:29 AM on August 13, 2015

My given first name was extremely popular in the 1970s so the "average lifespan" of that name is 32, which completely tripped me out since I'm 40.
posted by desjardins at 10:32 AM on August 13, 2015

No one with my name has ever died. WE ARE IMMORTAL.
posted by OolooKitty at 10:47 AM on August 13, 2015 [3 favorites]

According to the list, only one other person with my name has died. I'm roughly 24 million on the list. And I'm pretty sure I "know" who that person was. When I was in high school I got a number of calls one afternoon inquiring about my well being. If my memory serves, a kid with my name was riding on the trunk of a car for some reason and fell off. He went to the hospital and apparently died. Friends, coaches, and others heard about it on the news and called to see if the stories were about me. Thankfully I'm still here. But strange to think that the only other person with my name who is deceased was roughly my age and grew up in my city. Life is strange. And so is death, I suppose.
posted by friendlyjuan at 10:50 AM on August 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm not on the list which I suppose is a positive for the three or four other people that I know for certain have the same irregular spelling of my last name and share my first name. My first name has an average life span of 40 and my last name has a lifespan of 72 so I'm sure if I should be dead yet.
posted by dances with hamsters at 11:07 AM on August 13, 2015

Yep, still not dead.
posted by InfidelZombie at 11:12 AM on August 13, 2015

SSN Death Index is how my mom and I found out the day my step-grandfather, Harry, died. My grandmother was his third wife, and they were only married a short while before she died, but in that time he was very kind to her and to us. For me, since both grandfathers died either before I was born or not long after, Harry was the only grandfather I ever knew. He had other grandkids, ones that were actually related to him, but he always made me feel important and special.

When my grandmother got sick, he took care of her. He called us to tell us she had little time left and he wanted to make sure her only child and only grandchild got to see her. After she died, he mourned her only for a brief time and then he called my mom to ask her permission to get remarried. He wanted to re-marry his second wife, because he "wasn't strong and couldn't bear to live alone."

We got Christmas cards from him for the first few years, and then there was nothing. Then a year or two later my mom got a letter from him. He told her loved us both, but we wouldn't be hearing from him again. His wife was worried we would take any further contact the wrong way. He talked about my grandmother and how he loved her. There was no return address.

Years later when the internet came around and I heard about the Social Security death index, I was goofing off one day at work and started searching. After finding all my grandparents, some great aunts, a friend from high school, I put in Harry's name. The first name on the list was him and he'd died only the year before. From there I could find an obituary, and I found out he passed away at home with his children and grandchildren around him.

After years of not knowing, it was oddly comforting to know that he had passed and was with family when he did.
posted by teleri025 at 12:04 PM on August 13, 2015 [5 favorites]

I am with oolookitty. There is one other living person with my first and last name in the United States according to google. I would use this tool a lot more if it was hosted by social security administration dot gov (who is going to know anything they want to know about me anyways) and not search ancestry dot com who as far as I am concerned have the right to know nothing about me.
posted by bukvich at 12:37 PM on August 13, 2015

Yup, it'll be oolookitty, bukvich, and me for eternity. Also my grandfather who apparently didn't actually die.

Thanks, nonsensical assortment of letters that is my surname.
posted by Panjandrum at 1:13 PM on August 13, 2015

My last name was literally made up by my great-grandfather's family on claiming citizenship in the U.S., a portmanteau of two Scandinavian-sounding syllables, and there are only about twenty or thirty of us around, none having ever shared my first name -- so imagine my relief to see it report "NO DATA FOR THAT NAME". The last thing I need right now is an intriguing mystery.
posted by AzraelBrown at 1:18 PM on August 13, 2015

The average lifespan for my given name is 28, which is slightly unsettling seeing as I turn 29 next week!

(Not that surprising though - it's not exactly an old-fashioned name, and births for my name apparently peaked in 1987-88)
posted by randomnity at 1:19 PM on August 13, 2015

My, I've died 1,466 times, aged on average 71. Guess that's what I get for having a common first and last name.
posted by brecc at 3:27 PM on August 13, 2015

The most recent death of mine was in 2004, at the age of 83.
The next-most recent death was in 2003, at the age of 82.

7 deaths total.

That's suspicious.
posted by Lemurrhea at 3:30 PM on August 13, 2015

Thank you for posting this. I was in highschool when my dad died. My parents had already been divorced for years and I have basically little family on that side, only one uncle I don't talk to. Anyway, when he died I somehow missed what day it was, it was all such a blur. And because I lived far away from him and of the divorce I was extremely alone in grieiving for him, no one knew him or really cared that he was gone except me. Anyway because I was young and dumb and never wrote it down, i didnt know the exact day he died or his age. I did know the year of course, but I never had thought to look it up.

12-16-1998, 44 years old.

Somehow this just validates to me that he was counted and mattered.
posted by aetg at 5:58 PM on August 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

Looks like I died back in 1994. I'd have to go digging to compare the actual dates, but it's pretty darned close to when I had my first and middle name legally changed. We have a slightly unusual family name so there were only four folks with my previous first name listed. None of us seem to have made it past 50.
posted by michswiss at 6:04 PM on August 13, 2015