Dear GerSIG Members

Jan Meisels Allen, Chairperson, IAJGS Public Records Access Monitoring
Committee recently posted this in the IAJGS Records Access Alerts
mailing list.

"The Staatsarchiv Hamburg has posted to their website a notice that
they weeded medical certificates of death during the second quarter of
2018. The time frame of the medical certificates covered from
1876-1953. Retrospective weeding of the years 1837 - 1875 occurred in
1990. There were over one million individual sheets in the
destruction. Usually, the death certificates would have been issued
under the supervision of the authority responsible for the medical
system. The archives states the documents were in poor condition and
could not guarantee their permanent preservation. Originally, the
documents were stored as "alternatives" to death civil registers not
having yet reached the Hamburg State Archives.

Archive legislation covering birth, death and marriage civil registers
were transferred since 2009 to the State Archives meant that death
information - including data and place of death, marital status, name of
person registering the death could be ascertain directly >from the
death registers.

Further rationale as to why the Archives decided to destroy the death
certificates are included in the notice. The notice includes a chart
comparing data elements for death certificates and registers of death.
Page three of the notice also provides information on how one can
determine dates of birth missing >from the death register, and possible
research into causes of death. See:
https://www.hamburg.de/contentblob/11526092/419b169f1436bf2e6ce81b44877bb9a9/data/todesbescheinigungen-en.pdf

Jan thanked Teven Laxer, member of IAJGS Public Records Access
Monitoring Committee for providing this information."

Separately, Teven noted the notice is available in both German and
English, and the link to the German version is:
https://www.hamburg.de/contentblob/11441562/0c94298433b7e6d18f86ae54c7ad2035/data/todesbescheinigungen.pdf

Thank you Teven.

Jeanette R Rosenberg OBE, London UK
GerSIG Director jeanette.r.rosenberg@...