Thank you so much for keeping track of this for us!

I took the death indices for a test drive and found records of relatives whose death certificates I already had, but I do not give up hope of finding the missing. In any event, it's user-friendly site and much appreciated.

Any word on when Pennsylvania will be releasing more current data, say .... 2000 to present?

These are open records and for death records anything from before 50 years is open and for births anything from before 105 years is open.

It's the whole privacy thing.

I started looking through the death certificates. I think I found my Grandmother, but only if the number that I think is indicating age, is indeed that. What are all the numbers following the name? Also, I assumed M was for male and F for female, but I found whole pages, where everyone has an M, even the Esters, Janes and Mary's.

I looked at the 1955 H-I-J as a sample.

After the city/township, the first two digit number is the county number, then the date the person died, and finally the death certificate number.

look at it again. I think the 51 was probably the county number for Philadelphia. I was looking at 1943.

After the city name, "M" is the first letter of the last name.

After that:

"230" is the name "soundex" category. i.e. names that sound similar are grouped together.
"60" is the county. I don't have a reference for this.
"8 20 43" is the date of death
"74704" is the certificate number.

This was for a gentleman named Guy J. Musto from Gregg Township.

Very cool. Do you know how far back the records go?

I tried several years and names and all I get is a blank white screen.

It is not very user friendly and a bit slow, but it did work for me. Each file it "downloads" for viewing is a pdf that is 20MB large.