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The City of Boston's Registry Department manages birth, marriage, and death records for Boston with records dating as far back as 1630. They complete more than 100,000 transactions a year. Their pages are some of the most trafficked parts of Boston.gov and provide vital services to constituents.
The Department of Innovation and Technology’s (DoIT) Digital Team is bringing these records online. The majority of certificates can currently only be purchased by mail, fax, or in-person. A web application to order death certificates launched in March 2018 and DoIT is currently building out similar capabilities for birth/marriage certificates.
We focused on death certificates first because of the way the laws are structured in Massachusetts. Death certificates are entirely public record throughout the Commonwealth, so there are fewer privacy and security concerns associated with them.
Patty McMahon, Boston's Registrar, leads the Registry Department. She and her team have been working to digitize death certificates over the last few years, building out a database to be used for fulfillment. The database currently has records back to 1956.
We were able to leverage that database and connect it to a user-facing application on Boston.gov that allows constituents to order death certificates online. Payment processing is routed through Stripe. The Registry receives the order request and payment then ships a certified copy of the death certificate to the constituent by mail.
We successfully launched the death certificates application in March 2018 and have seen a rapid increase in online purchases (versus in person or by mail) since implementation. You can read more about the project here.
- City Registrar: Patty McMahon
- Product Management: Rachel Braun
- Engineering: Fin Hopkins
After digitizing death certificates, we've now moved our focus to birth certificates.