Try contacting the younger members of the family geneaology. Also check with the records departments of the areas that your relatives lived in - cemeteries can have information like that as well if needed because there were a reasonable amount of people who had pre-determined burial plots - and family plots also. Also, ask some of the other family members to help you with this - it can be a great way to get to know some lost-lost relatives you hadn't met or hadn't spent time with for some time! Good luck.

First of all, congratulations! Many people begin with a blank sheet of paper or maybe their own birth certificate & marriage certificate .. and that's it! So you have someone in your family tree who spent time researching .. and even better .. chose to write it down. :) 1) Not sure what the scope of the family genealogy is that you inherited - and whether it's on charts - or notes - or book - or if you have all the files with backup info and the SOURCES that prove this or that fact or event or relationship. All those things come into play as you assess what you've been given - and where you want to go from here. 2) No matter the answer above? You could and should consider all that "clues" to your ancestry .. that you would now set out to verify as true, not true or possibly true but need more evidence. If you're lucky, you inherited source notes for the family info. If not, you'll have to begin at the beginning. 3) Beyond all that? Death dates are one type of vital record .. and VRs are one type of many records and sources out there. All might have the very info you need to prove a relationship or event or location. 4) Start with what you know and work backwards. "What you know" means a person, place, event, date .. then sources to back up any of the pieces about that .. or even additional facts about it. 5) For death records? Several ways to go: --a) Ask the family if they have death certificates you can make copies or scans of .. or photograph. --b) Visit the cemeteries - or search transcriptions of tombstone info http://www.findagrave.com --c) Death records from whichever funeral homes handled the burials of your people into the cemeteries where you've located them --d) Check the Social Security Death Index http://ssdi.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/ssdi.cgi --e) Check for any obituaries in local newspapers in the likely time range you need - or exactly once you have some dates http://www.legacy.com --f) Contact the local town halls, etc - to get a copy of birth or marriage or death certificates. --g) Ditto that for state level record holders. These are often copies (USA), and might cost more and take longer to get though. --h) Best of the above is to walk into local office and make photocopies yourself .. or .. look for a local volunteer who can do that. Tip of the iceberg, but fun to track down stuff. You might even get to know some of your cousins .. now!