Cook County Medical Examiner Indigent Cremation Records

Records list unclaimed individuals cremated by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. The dataset includes demographic and event date columns such as Name, Age, Sex, Race, Date of Death, and Cremation Date. It is published by datacatalog.cookcountyil.gov and was last updated in early April 2026.

Use Cases

• Analyzing demographic disparities (Race, Sex, Age) in unclaimed deaths.
• Tracking temporal patterns in indigent cremations using Date of Death and Cremation Date fields.
• Case management and record linkage for social services via the Case number identifier.
• Studying mortality rates and causes within vulnerable, unclaimed populations.

Strengths

• Dataset provides specific demographic columns (Sex, Race, Age) for granular analysis.
• Includes precise temporal markers (Date of Death, Cremation Date) for event sequencing.
• Published by an official government source (datacatalog.cookcountyil.gov), lending authority.

Limitations

• Critical metadata conflicts exist: row count, size, and license are reported as unknown or 'None' across all sources.
• Data completeness for individual records is uncertain without validation against source systems.

Provenance

Source

Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office

Collection Method

Administrative records of unclaimed indigents processed for cremation.

Freshness

2026-04-05 05:13:37.429478

Geography

Cook County, Illinois, USA