If you need vital records for genealogical purposes, you will discover they are not always easy to obtain. In New Jersey, due to budget constraints, the state no longer issues vital records certificates except for legal purposes, such as for a passport, school requirement, or inheritance. If your ancestors were married in Pennsylvania, outside of a large city, you may have difficulty in finding the records since most of its counties did not begin keeping marriage records until October 1885. And, even you can obtain them, the costs of vital records continue to rise and will put a huge dent in your budget, especially if you need a number of them. Modern birth and death records, maintained by the states, were originally generated at the requests of physicians, primarily to compile medical statistics on epidemic diseases such as yellow fever, typhoid and cholera.
Most genealogists are avid about the right to open vital records.
On the other hand, most of us are also concerned about the right to privacy. As a result we find ourselves caught in a dilemma. Since vital records offices try to protect themselves before releasing information, you may have to answer why you are requesting the certificate and your relationship to the person whose record you are requesting. Of course, you may not know if a particular John Smith is your great-grandfather, and that is why you are trying to obtain his death record. It can be a genealogical Catch-22.