Coroner's inquests

What an inquest file contains

The Library of Virginia describes three main documents. The inquisition or inquest is the official ruling on the cause of death. Depositions are the testimony of witnesses questioned by the coroner, the jurors, or other local officials. The summons is the court's order calling citizens to serve on the coroner's jury. Files may also contain exhibits such as letters, drawings, photographs, or items found with the body, as well as autopsies and death certificates.

In Virginia, an inquisition typically names the coroner and the jurors, gives the name and age of the deceased if known, his or her sex and race, and states when, how, and by what means the person died. A deposition may give the witness's name, age, residence, profession, and relationship to the deceased, along with an account of what happened.

Reading between the lines

Testimony is where genealogy hides. The Missouri State Archives points out that inquest testimony can imply relationships that are not stated anywhere else, since friends and family often gave sworn statements. If a witness was interviewed through a translator, that may indicate an immigrant, which can lead to naturalization records. If the inquest suggested a crime or returned a verdict against someone, circuit court records or penitentiary records may hold more.

Verdicts use the words of their time. A natural death with no sign of violence was often recorded in nineteenth-century Virginia as visitation by God. Other common findings include accidental death, drowning, and exposure to the elements.

Before 1865, Virginia inquests state whether the deceased was enslaved, if that was known, and generally give the enslaver's name and residence. Enslaved people could give depositions at inquests, unlike most other court proceedings of the period, so these files can be valuable for African American genealogy. Keep in mind who wrote the official account: in Virginia before the Civil War the jury was made up of twelve white men, and the Library of Virginia cautions that this bias should be kept in mind when reading the records.

How the office changed

The coroner's office was a carryover from the British legal system. In Virginia it appeared about 1660. The number of jurors there fell from twelve to six by an act of 1877; by 1926 the coroner alone decided the cause of death, and the office was abolished in 1946 in favor of a Chief Medical Examiner, with a statewide medical examiner's office by 1950.

Some cities moved to medical examiners earlier. New York State abolished New York City's coroners by a 1915 law, and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner took over on January 1, 1918. In Missouri, the coroner is a county official, usually elected, who investigates accidental, questionable, unusual, or suspicious deaths. When you move past these dates, look for medical examiner records instead of coroner's inquests.

Where inquests survive

Inquests were local records, kept by the county or city, and survival is patchy. The Library of Virginia holds inquisitions from the colonial period to 1950, but its holdings for a single county or city rarely cover that whole span. As of September 2024, its digital collection had more than 900 inquisitions from eight localities, and staff had identified 66 localities with coroner's records to add over time.

The Missouri State Archives keeps a free online Coroner's Inquest Database, an abstract of records from various counties, the City of St. Louis, and the St. Louis Medical Examiner, with the originals on microfilm at the archives. Coverage differs by county; for example, Cooper County runs from 1824 to 1929 and St. Louis City from 1845 to 1900. Each entry gives the case number, name, age or birth date, race, sex, date, cause and place of death, and the microfilm reel and box and file numbers.

In New York City, the Municipal Archives has coroner's records for all five boroughs from 1898 to 1917, and earlier records for Manhattan from 1853 to 1897, Kings County from 1863 to 1896, and Queens from 1884 to 1897. They usually give more detail about how a death happened than the death certificate does. Medical examiner records from 1918 to 1950 are found through an index that leads to a docket book listing the name, date of death, last residence, age, where the body was found, who reported the death, and the cause.