Note: This article was published previously on the Granite FamilySearch Center blog site.

One of the new sources added to FamilySearch this year is NUMIDENT which stands for “Numerical Identification Files.” The U.S. Social Security Administration created NUMIDENT files to record the earnings of US workers and to determine what benefits each person was authorized to have. The index only contains information for deceased individuals and was gathered from three record types—Social Security applications, deaths, and claims. Each compiled record includes the following fields:

• Name of the deceased person
• Birth date
• Gender
• Birth city
• Social security number
• Birth state or country
• Parents’ names
• Death date

Because the NUMIDENT file contains information about a person from different times in his/her life, often there are multiple name variants listed in the NUMIDENT file. These files record a verified death of people born between 1936 and 2007 or who would have been over 110 years old by December 31, 2007. This makes the records useful because they may contain the complete death dates of people who have been found in the 1940 or 1950 census and do not yet have other published death records. If researchers only have a census record to document family members, the NUMIDENT record also provides the complete birth date, birth location and parents’ names of the person. NUMIDENT records for some women will show multiple surnames indicating more than one possible spouse. For some people, name variations, nicknames and aliases may be included in the NUMIDENT record.

As an example, I found the following NUMIDENT record for my mother-in-law, Winifred Wilkinson Bates:

The record shows that when she first applied for a Social Security card, her name was Winifred Wilkinson (her maiden name). After her marriage in 1955, she applied again using her married name Winifred Wilkinson Bates. She made another application in 1977 using that same name after the death of her spouse, and her death record shows a slight variation, Winifred W. Bates. Her exact birth date and location, death date, sex, race, and parents’ names are also provided in the file.

NUMIDENT provides a valuable new source that will be especially helpful for those just beginning to work on their family history and who know little about their roots. I recently was able to help a man find three of his grandparents’ names using NUMIDENT. It was an exciting and moving discovery for him!

You can learn more about NUMIDENT records from the following sources:

• https://aad.archives.gov/aad/content/aad_docs/rg047_num_faq_2018Dec.pdf
• https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/United_States,_Social_Security_Numerical_Identification_Files_(NUMIDENT)_-_FamilySearch_Historical_Records

-Marianne Bates, Consultant, Granite FamilySearch Center