The Office for National Statistics (ONS) Public Health Mortality File Death Record. From parish registers pre-1837, to centralised paper-based death certificates, to electronic death records imported into immense relational databases, as an object the death record may be the final piece of information about who you were. The electronic death record contains remnants of the romance of the more personal parish register (place of birth, maiden name, occupation, and parents’ occupation). However, the legal requirement to register a death becomes (in the health and social care arena) a depersonalised electronic administrative coding system to monitor population size, scrutinize geographical variation in causes of premature mortality and allocate costs.