We discovered in a previous Case Study using the Social Security Death Index that Joseph Gill was born in Chicago in 1885 and died there in 1972. We learned the names of his parents and wife but we didn't discover anything about his family. So we decided to search for some online family trees to see if we could learn something about his family.
We went to Ancestry.com and searched Public Member Trees by keying in the information listed above. We discovered that Joseph Gill is listed as part of a "Green Family Tree". According to this Family Tree Joseph Gill had the following siblings: Mary, James, Richard, Loretta, Anna, Frank and Eleanor. All of these children of Richard and Bridget Sweeney Gill were born in Chicago between 1881 and 1898.
Next we did a Google search using the phrase "gill family tree" joseph chicago and we found the Daniel Gill Family Tree. According to this Family Tree Joseph Gill's family was from Islandmore, an island off the coast of Westport, County Mayo, Ireland.
This Family Tree contains 150 Daniel Gill descendants from 33 families - in addition to Joseph there are 86 other Gills listed. Joseph's grandparents were James and Mary McHale Gill, his great grandfather was William Gill and his gg grandfather was Daniel Gill.
Death indexes are good places to find death dates. If you enter death index and a state name into a search engine you will probably find a number of online death indexes for that state. A website might list individual death indexes for some of the counties, cities or towns in the state.
An individual death index might provide the death date and an obituary or the death index might provide the death date and the name of the parents of the deceased.