Thanks hhEb09'1, the USA is probably freeer with info than Australia. The couple of enquiries I have made have received no response. Perhaps I should pluck up the courage to write to Minnesota, or maybe to the Mormons, and explain clearly what I am doing. Lacking any institutional framework for a research ethics accreditation may be a problem, and I am not sure what university might help with that. The data is there, but they would need to provide it in the format I need, which is a spreadsheet with two columns listing dates of birth and death, and possibly a third column for cause of death, then as many rows as they can send. The prospect of a trip to Saint Paul in the winter to bunker down with a microfiche for three months to do data entry is somehow not that appealing.