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SS-5 Form Online Ordering

Ordering a SS-5 Social Security Application

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Recently I was asked about ordering a copy of an ancestor’s Social Security application. The application, called an SS-5 Form, is usually used for genealogy to get the names of the applicant’s parents. If you don’t know the birth date of a relative, it can also be used for that purpose, although that information is available in the public SSDI databases (and parents names are not).

The SSDI

The Social Security Death Index (SSDI) is a database of deaths recorded by the Social Security Administration. It’s official name is actually the Death Master File (DMF). When published online for genealogy purposes it is referred to as the SSDI. According to FamilySearch, the SSDI includes an increasing percentage of recorded deaths as time goes on from 1962 (when the index started):

The index includes about 50 percent of deceased persons from 1962 to 1971 and about 85 percent of the deceased persons from 1972 to 2005. It also includes a few deaths from 1937 to 1961.

That said, the database itself shows something a bit different. If you search for all deaths in the database from 1937 to 1961, there are 740,152 results. That’s a bit more than ‘a few’. What’s going on here? Even weirder, if you search for records before 1937 (when SS started) there are also records (a bit over 2500). Something is obviously wrong with these records. Keep these imperfections in mind when using the data. If you’re wondering why the percentage increases, it’s because not every working person was registered in the early days of the system. As time went on, more people participated in social security, and thus more people are also recorded in the SSDI.

So assuming your relative is among those recorded in the SSDI, how do you find their record, and assuming you find it, how do you get the record? One thing first…

Restrictions on Usage

You might have read that congress has criticized the online publication of social security numbers and accused online companies that do so of making identity theft easier. I have argued in the past that in fact that is backwards, but putting that aside, some online services have put restrictions on access to  SSDI data, such as not showing anyone who died in the past 10 years, etc. Recently a law was passed making it impossible to order SS-5 Forms for anyone who died in the previous 3 years. The law also effects the publication of new deaths to the SSDI, but won’t kick in until March (see this article at the Legal Genealogist for more information on that).

Whether 3 or 10 years, however, that doesn’t affect genealogists at all due to another government policy change. Back in 2011, the Social Security administration changed the access rules, where before you could order a complete SS-5 form for any deceased person born more than 70 years ago, they increased it to anyone born more than 100 years ago. Additionally, if the death of the application cannot be proved, then full records are not available for 120 years after the applicant’s birth.

So it’s currently January 8, 2014. That means if the person is known to be dead (i.e. you have a death certificate, or their death is recorded in the SSDI) then they need to have been born before January 8, 1914 if you’re going to be able to get a full record that shows the applicant’s parent’s names. If they don’t show up in the SSDI and you don’t have a record of their death (but you do have a social security number), then they have to have been born before January 8, 1894 if you want to get the applicant’s parents names.

Don’t Order Records That Won’t Help

Keep in mind one important thing. If the person was born more recently than 100 years ago, you can still order a copy of the SS-5. The Social Security Administration will happily take your money and send you a copy of the record, however, they will block out the names of the parents in the copy they send you (making the record mostly useless for genealogical purposes).

Searching the SSDI

To find a person’s social security number (and at the same time confirm that they are deceased according the Social Security Administration) you can search the SSDI on several sites. One good site is FamilySearch’s SSDI search page. Another public search page is Mocavo’s SSDI Search page. I will say that I believe FamilySearch’s to be the most up-to-date database, and they also post what date the database was updated – as of today it was updated with data up to November 30, 2013 – less than two months ago. Indeed my grandfather who passed away in September is listed in the FamilySearch database, but not in the Mocavo one.

Ordering Records

So let’s say the relative you’re researching was born more than a hundred years ago. You find their Social Security number, either through the SSDI or through other means. How do you order a record? Well that’s actually easy. You just go to the Request for Deceased Individual’s Social Security Record page, pay your $27 and order the record.

SS-5 Form Online Ordering
Ordering an SS-5 Form Online

Interestingly for two dollars more you can order the record even without the Social Security number. This is odd because searching for the record without the number would seem much more difficult and more costly than $2.

A Final Thought on the Restrictions

As I mentioned, my grandfather passed away in September. If I wanted to order his SS-5 form, according to the 2011 regulations I wouldn’t be able to order his un-redacted SS-5 form until he would have been 100, which in his case is not too far away – he was 98 – so July 2015. However, because of the new law recently passed, I can’t order the SS-5 at all until 3 years have passed, so September 2016. An extra year and a bit. In general, however, the restriction is likely to be on the 100-year regulation.

Everyone now needs to wait 3 years on ordering an SS-5 now, but if a relative passed away at the age of 80, you’d have to wait 20 years before you could get the un-redacted SS-5 form with the name of the relative’s parents on it. If your relative died before 2011 and you had ordered the records before the regulatory change then, you could have ordered the same SS-5 Form immediately, and received it un-redacted (since the relative was over 70).

New Social Security Death Index (SSDI) Search

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I previously wrote about how many genealogy sites have been removing or restricting access to parts or even the entire Social Security Death Index (SSDI), due to pressure from lawmakers who have tried to make it seem like access to the SSDI was contributing to identity theft. I won’t go over that again, but you can read my earlier post Changes in Access to the SSDI and Vital Records.

One company, Mocavo, seems to be bucking the trend of most of the genealogy companies out there to restrict access to the SSDI, and has actually introduced a very nice new search engine for the SSDI, which seems to include all the information in the database, including social security numbers. In order to see the results, you need to sign up for a free account on Mocavo if you haven’t already. I suspect launching this SSDI search engine is largely a way to bring in users to their site. The search results also allow you to add comments, something I haven’t seen before on SSDI databases. How this will be used will be interesting.

I’m not a regular user of Mocavo, but it seems that this is the first actual database they’ve added to their site, and thus this comment feature is also new. With their search engine, they have the ability to ‘follow’ a page, but this is the first time I’ve seen the ability to comment. I don’t know if you are notified of someone else’s comments on the same record, or if you have to go back and check regularly. I also don’t see a way to send messages to other users (such as if someone commented that the person in the record was their great-grandmother, and they have a picture of her) but perhaps this is coming. If you are notified of other comments, then it might not matter too much, although without private messaging people would have to post their e-mail addresses publicly to take a conversation further, which is not ideal. As this is a brand new feature, however, I’m sure they’re working on something.

Some other features of Mocavo are also interesting, such as being able to mark a search result as already read, and being able to say that a specific result is about the person you were searching for, maybe close, not who you are looking for, or is a broken link. Mocavo presumably uses this data to improve its search results.

As I tell people who ask me about it, we don’t know if lawmakers will decide to restrict access to the SSDI in the future. I always suggest going through one’s family records and searching through the SSDI for anyone likely to have had a social security number and copying down everything into your personal database. If in the future access is removed, you may not be able to get the information later. Information that can be very helpful from the SSDI records includes birth date (take with a grain of salt), death date (more likely to be accurate),  what state their social security number was issued in, the person’s last residence, and where their last benefit was sent (which may be different from last residence and indicate where a spouse moved). So if you haven’t done so already, take a look at your family tree, figure out who is likely to have had a social security number (someone who was working from the late 1930s on) and search through Mocavo’s search engine, or one of the others available online (see my older article about that).

Changes in Access to the SSDI and Vital Records

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I’ve been meaning to write this post for the past few weeks, and am sorry I did not do so earlier. There have been a number of changes in access to data of interest to genealogists in the United States going on, and in some cases this can seriously effect the ability of people to do research.

One major source of information for genealogists has been the Social Security Death Master File, usually referred to online as the Social Security Death Index (SSDI). The Death Master File is considered by law to be a public document, and lists all people who applied for a social security number (with an SS-5 form) and subsequently had their deaths reported to the Social Security Administration. Information on the SS-5 form can frequently be very useful to family researchers, as it usually lists the names of the parents of the applicant.

SSA increases delay in receiving names of parents

Last month, the Social Security Administration, without any announcement, extended the amount of time one must wait to get the names of parents on a social security application from 70 to 100 years from the applicant’s birth. In other words, if last month you could order an SS-5 form of someone born in 1941 and find out their parent’s names, now you will not be able to order that record until 2041. Put another way, you can only order records today for people born before 1911. In fact, the reality is worse, you can order the SS-5 and they will charge you for it, but they will just white-out the parent’s names which is probably the only good reason to order an SS-5 anyways.

Reduction in State records in the DMF

Another change also took effect last month, when it was announced that some state death records would no longer be incorporated into the Death Master File, and over 4 million existing records would be expunged from the existing file. The reason for this is a claim that state records have different privacy rules, and thus cannot be incorporated into the public Death Master File. This also means nearly a million records a year will no longer be added to the Death Master File going forward (over over 30% of records that would have been added). Why this wasn’t recognized for the past decades this file has been available is not mentioned. Additionally, it seems the Social Security Administration has also dropped last residence zip codes from the information they add to the Death Master File. When dealing with people with common names in large cities, zip codes are very useful in figuring out which record it the correct record.

Massachusetts tries to go against hundreds of years of open access rules

In my home state of Massachusetts, a bill (H.603) was introduced earlier this year in the state legislature to restrict access to birth records in the state. Massachusetts has always been an open access state when it comes to public records, so this would actually be the first time that access to vital records have been restricted in Massachusetts. Open access to vital records can be seen as an easy way for identity thieves to steal information, or as an easy way to prove the legitimacy of identities. This reckless attempt to restrict access to these records is not just a setback for genealogists, but will restrict access to those people looking to build a family medical history (needed for some inherited diseases) and also restrict the ability of military personnel to track down next-of-kin of soldiers, something the genealogical community has helped the military with for many years. It’s also a bit of political hackery, as it doesn’t actually address the issue of identity theft.

Good politics?

It’s not clear to me why this has become a political issue for some, but I guess seeming to protect people’s privacy (while not actually doing anything about it) is good politics. Politicians love to scare people and tell them that their identities will be stolen if the government doesn’t crack down on identity theft. Except, they don’t actually crack down on identity theft, such as addressing how its possible for someone to file for taxes with the social security number of a deceased person. You’d think the IRS would have access to the Death Master File, and could automatically check social security numbers against filings, but that would be too simple a solution (and would actually put the onus of checking for fraud with a government agency).

The KIDS Act of 2011

In steps Representative Samuel Johnson (R-TX) and his Keeping IDs Safe Act of 2011. This bill, also knows as the KIDS Act, would make it illegal for the government to release the Death Master File at all. Does it address fraud at all? No. Does it prevent government employees from sharing information with identity thieves? No. How about legislating 10 year jail sentences for government employees who release personal information to anyone unauthorized to view it? Regardless, this bill and some of the press coverage of identify thefts that led up to it, has scared various genealogy companies into cutting back on access to the SSDI.

My sister’s story

It’s worth noting a story from when I was a child in Boston. As I recall, my teenage sister had gone to get her driver’s license and it was supposed to be mailed to her. Except it never arrived. Eventually she contacted the RMV and they sent her her license. What happened to the original one? Nobody knew. Well, someone knew. One day we get a call from a branch of our bank the next town over. This was when people still went to the bank to, you know, do bank stuff. A woman had arrived each day over the past several days and deposited checks into my sisters account adding up to a lot of money. Before those checks could clear, she arrived again at the teller she had been depositing those checks with, and asked to make a withdrawal. She had a driver’s license with her picture on it, but my sister’s name. The teller didn’t know my sister, but she thought the woman looks a bit older than my sister’s age as listed on the license. The teller asked the woman to wait a moment, and brought the license to the branch manager. The manager had previously worked in the branch my family went to, and actually knew my family, and knew this was not my sister. It was an interesting scam, of course. Depositing checks with the teller so the teller would associate her with depositing money into the account, then using a fake license to withdraw money from the account. If the branch manager hadn’t previously worked at the branch in our town back in those days when branch managers knew their customers, the woman might have gotten away with it. In the end, I don’t remember if that woman was arrested, or got away. I do remember being told they had tracked the scam back to the RMV where multiple licenses had been forged with incorrect photos. I don’t know how much the RMV worker was paid to forge my sister’s license, nor what the thought process was that led them to risk doing that, but presumably if there had been harsh laws against this, they would not have done it.

I’ll guess most of the people reading this haven’t seen the movie this comes from, but this had to be done:

That must have been when Samuel Johnson was still trying to get into the college parties…

For those who are lost, I’ll share this clip from the movie Superbad:

That isn’t high art, and that clip is highly edited from the original (this is a family blog after all), but I felt it necessary to insert a little comic relief here. Back to the issue at hand…

The easiest site to search SSDI online has long been Rootsweb, which is a genealogy community site that has been hosted and run by Ancestry.com for more than 10 years. The Rootsweb SSDI page just days ago changed from a site that allowed full searching of the SSDI, to the following message:

Due to sensitivities around the information in this database, the Social Security Death Index collection is not available on our free Rootsweb service but is accessible to search on Ancestry.com. Visit the Social Security Death Index page to be directly connected to this collection

If you follow the link to Ancestry.com’s own SSDI search page, you can search and get results, but unless you are a member of Ancestry.com, you only get partial information. Even if you have an Ancestry.com subscription, they’ve further cut back on the information available in their SSDI database, as they describe:

Why can’t I see the Social Security Number? If the Social Security Number is not visible on the record index it is because Ancestry.com does not provide this number in the Social Security Death Index for any person that has passed away within the past 10 years.”

This is a bit of pre-emptive work it seems, to keep the politicians off their backs.

Ancestry.com and GenealogyBank cut back on SSDI access

Ancestry.com is not the only company to cut back on access to the SSDI. GenealogyBank has eliminated the social security numbers from its database altogether. Genealogybank offers free searching of their SSDI database, but you must register for the site in order to see the results. Even if you’re a subscriber, there are no social security numbers listed in their database at all now. GenealogyBank says they removed all social security numbers after people called them and explained they were erroneously in the SSDI and everyone could access their social security numbers through the GenealogyBank database. One article I read online estimated that out of the 2.8 million new entries added each year, some 14,000 entries are added for people who are still living. That seems a clear statistical estimate (half of one percent), and I have no idea how they came up with that number, nor how many of those false entries get removed from the database in subsequent revisions. I’m not saying people are not horribly effected by these mistakes in the SSDI, but maybe the solution is to fix the processes that introduce those mistakes? Any even if there are 14,000 mistakes a year, no one has shown that this has led to a single stolen identity as far as I can tell.

FamilySearch.org still offering SSDI access…for now…

FamilySearch.org still offers free searching of their SSDI database, without registration, and still shows the social security numbers of everyone in their database. I don’t know how long that will last, however. Personally, I recommend everyone search the FamilySearch.org database and mark down the information they have on each person in your tree. This isn’t only the social security number, but the birth date, death date, place of issuance (of the social security number), last residence, and place where last benefit was sent. All of this information can be useful in genealogy research, and while these companies are removing the social security numbers now as a pre-emptive attempt to prevent further regulation, if regulation does arrive from the legislature, as written now it would eliminate access to all of this information (not just the social security numbers). Therefore, I suggest making a list of those people in your database who were working in the US after 1935, and going through the FamilySearch.org SSDI Database and copy all the information you can, while you still can…

Also, for a comparison of the Ancestry.com and Familysearch.org SSDI databases (written before the changes), see this article from Ancestry Insider called SSDI: Ancestry.com vs. FamilySearch.org. If you have a subscription to Ancestry.com, it might be worth it to take a look at their database as well, to see if they list the ZIP code for earlier entries in the database.

People lie, and so do documents

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It’s not uncommon to find records that have intentionally incorrect dates and other information on them. One situation in particular which is common is in passenger manifests for people coming from Europe to the US. Frequently you’ll find someone who lists their age as 17 or 18, when in fact they’re younger but lied to get on the ship to America. Sometimes the age given when coming to America was used in official documents going forward, even if they were wrong. Without a birth certificate or other documentation from the old country, you may forever think someone was older than they really were.

My point with bringing this up is that when you’re doing research it’s very hard to confirm information from a single record, or even multiple records sometimes. A good example of the issues involved is that while you can usually trust a death certificate to have accurate information on a person’s death, it may not be a good idea to trust the birth information listed on it. If the birth information on a death certificate is all you have on that person, go ahead and use that birth information, but always source it properly so you know where the information came from. If you one day track down a birth certificate on the same person and the information is different, then trust the birth certificate over the death certificate.

There are many kinds of records out there, some ‘official’ records like birth and death certificates, and some unofficial like birth announcements and obituaries in newspapers. Obituaries can be a great tool for building your family tree, as they frequently contain lists of surviving children, maiden names, etc. Nowadays many small local newspapers are being scanned and put online, some which you need to pay for and some which are free to use. I was recently searching through a free searchable database of Georgia newspapers, part of the Digital Library of Georgia. Of particular interest to Jewish researchers with family that lived in the southern states in the US, is a publication called the Southern Israelite. It contains issues of this magazine from 1929 through 1986. It started as a local newsletter in Augusta, then moved to Atlanta where it covered all of Georgia and then eventually covered other southern states as well.

In any event, records I found illustrate this point about not trusting records too much. I found an obituary printed on July 8, 1983 about Louis Lesser, who it says died about a week earlier on June 29th. It lists his age as 72.

Obituary printed July 8th

See the obituary as printed on July 8th.

If one had no other records about the death of Louis Lesser, and he was in your family, you would probably enter the information in this obituary into your genealogy program. That’s a perfectly normal thing to do. Make sure of course to properly cite the death infromation as coming from this obituary and where and when the obituary was published. The interesting thing about this is that a second obituary pops up a couple of weeks later, in the July 22 issue of the same magazine. It has different information. I suppose you might assume the first one had mistakes and the second one was the corrected version. See the second obituary, published on July 22 on the right.

Obituary printed July 22nd

Now, what do you see? The age listed is 71, not 72. The date Louis Lesser died is listed is June 30, not June 29. There is also additional family information. So assuming the second version is the corrected version, you would guess Louis Lesser died on the 30th and was 71. What can we confirm here? Well, you could look up the record in the SSDI. The SSDI index doesn’t give the date, only the month, so we can’t confirm the date without ordering the full record, but it does list a birth date of Oct 5, 1910. Again, take this date with a grain of salt, it is only the date used when the person applied for a social security number, but let’s use it to see what the person’s age should be. Clearly, according to this date, he’s 72, and closer to 73 than 71. Thus the age listed is probably wrong in the second record. Not a good sign. Okay, so how can we confirm the date? Well I googled ‘south carolina death certificates’ to see if there was some searchable index and came across the Death Indexes page for South Carolina. If you scan down the list of resources, you’ll see there is a link to cemetery burials by the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina. The site lets you browse the cemeteries, but without knowing which cemetery the person was buried in, this could take a long time. Luckily, they’ve put in a search box to let you search the whole site. Searching the site brings up a page for the Emanu-el Cemetery in Charleston, SC with his burial record. The good news is it lists the same birth date for him, so although neither the SSDI date or this record are necessarily trustworthy records, at least you now have two records showing the same birth date. For the death date, which is the date listed on his grave, it says June 29th. Nothing is 100%, but if the date is on his grave it’s probably correct. Thus it seems the original obituary had the correct information on his age and the day of his death, not the one published later. Not what you might guess from seeing two obituaries in the same paper a couple of weeks apart.

So to review, don’t trust something just because it’s in print, and while make assumptions like a later revised obituary is probably correct might make sense to you, it isn’t always the right assumption. Always try to confirm the information you find through other sources, and site the source for every piece of information in your records.