Ancestry.com death and genealogical records (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

Ancestry.com is a paid subscription product, so it carries no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session. Treat it as unverified until someone exercises it through a licensed Ancestry subscription. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

Ancestry.com aggregates genealogical and vital records: the Social Security Death Index, state death indexes, obituaries, census records, and family trees. For research it is the standard way to hand-collect birth and death dates for a named set of individuals when no administrative mortality file is available. A paper we distill uses it: Borgschulte, Guenzel, Liu & Malmendier hand-collect birth and death dates from Ancestry.com for 2,361 of 2,720 CEOs at 1,501 firms to build the CEO Mortality Data Set, then estimate how industry distress and antitakeover-law protection affect CEO longevity.

• Cost: licensed, consumer subscription (tiered by record collection).
• Vendor: Ancestry.com.
• Coverage: U.S. and international vital and genealogical records, deepest for U.S. deaths via the Social Security Death Index and state indexes; the research asset is a hand-matched set of birth / death dates for named individuals.

Access (when licensed)

• Through an Ancestry.com subscription. Records are searched on the Ancestry web platform; there is no bulk research feed, so a mortality panel is assembled by searching each named individual and recording matched dates.
• Identity matching by name and detail. A person is matched on name plus corroborating detail (birth year, location, employer, relatives); the match is hand-judged. Keep the matched dates and provenance, not scraped pages.
• Respect the terms of use. Ancestry’s terms restrict automated access and redistribution; collection is manual or within permitted limits, and personal records stay inside the licence. Keep any credentials in .env, never hard-coded.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• Coverage is not a census, and absence is ambiguous. A person not found may be alive, or simply unrecorded; the Social Security Death Index misses some deaths and lags recent ones. Treat “no death record” as missing, not as survival, without a confirming source. The citing paper matches 2,361 of 2,720 CEOs, so roughly 13 percent are unmatched.
• Match accuracy drives the result. Common names and thin detail produce false matches (attributing the wrong death) and missed matches; for mortality analysis a single wrong death date is a large error. Hand-verify and report the match rate.
• Survivorship and selection in who is searchable. Prominent individuals (executives) are better documented than the general population, so match rates and data quality are not representative; do not generalize the matched sample’s completeness to other groups.
• Date precision varies. Some records give only a year or month; mixing exact and coarse dates biases any duration / hazard estimate. Record date precision and handle it explicitly.
• No stable research identifier. Records carry names, not IDs; linking to a firm or compensation panel (for example Execucomp) is a name-and-tenure match with its own error. Document the link.

Citation

Cite the source and that dates were hand-collected, e.g.: Birth and death dates hand-collected from Ancestry.com, accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State the population, the match rate, the date precision, and the identity-matching procedure.