Thanks Doug - I missed the readme and notes files, should have checked them
first.

There are bizarre coincidences out there. As I started looking for data on this
topic I
clicked first on the 1922-23 Canadiens to find two players, Odie and Sprague
Cleghorn-
brothers, with my maternal grandparent's last name. They brothers Cleghorn died
within
days of each other and are buried in the same cemetery as my maternal
grandmother -
Sheena Cleghorn. Spooky. I will post updates on our project as we work through
it.

Best,
Chris

--- In hockey-databank@yahoogroups.com, "dsreyn" <dreynolds@...> wrote:
>
> The death info has been cobbled together from multiple sources.
> Generally speaking, any source I have used (for the entire project) is
> listed in the "references and acknowledgements" part of the readme
> file included with each release. The death information specifically
> has generally come from one of the following:
>
> - Total Hockey
> - hockey-reference.com
> - Find A Grave (www.findagrave.com)
> - SIHR (www.sihrhockey.org) - they've posted annual lists of
> hockey-related deaths for the last several years
> - LostHockey.com (www.losthockey.com)
>
> I have occasionally added recent deaths (the last year or so) after
> seeing news stories on ESPN.com, the hockhist Yahoo group, HFBoards,
> etc. Though of course, these generally show up in the annual SIHR
> lists. In case you're wondering, as a general rule I avoid using
> Wikipedia for anything that I can't corroborate elsewhere.
>
> As far as reliability of the information is concerned, I'm fairly
> confident the death info is fairly reliable. However, keep in mind
> that consulting multiple sources will sometimes yield different dates
> for the same player. There's also one case in particular that's
> probably wrong. There are two players in the database named Jack
> McDonald - one born in 1887, the other in 1921. Total Hockey and
> Hockey-reference.com give a date of death for *both* as 1/24/58. Two
> players with the same name, born 34 years apart, both dying on the
> same date? Seems like an incredible coincidence (though Adams and
> Jefferson both died on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of
> Independence, so I suppose anything is possible) - I suspect the
> likely explanation is a mixup given the identical names.
>
> The "9999" entries indicate that a player is known to be deceased, but
> no specific details are known. I have only marked players as deceased
> in this way if they are indicated as such either in Total Hockey, or
> in the player career totals lists in the Official NHL Guide & Record
> Book. There are a number of other players who can be presumed to be
> deceased given their birth year, but I have not marked them as
> deceased without confirmation.
>
> Doug
>
> --- In hockey-databank@yahoogroups.com, "chris.fletcher66"
> <cfmletcher@> wrote:
> >
> > Hi - This is a great resource, thanks for putting it together! I am
> starting a bit of research on
> > how long hockey players live, change in lifespan over time, and
> comparisons to the national
> > (canada) average.
> >
> > A couple of questions about the database:
> >
> > Where do date of death records come from? I am curious about how
> much confidence we can
> > put in these dates.
> >
> > Some DoD fields are marked "9999" and others are blank including
> people born in the 1890s
> > and presumably gone now. Is there a distinction here?
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Chris Fletcher
> >
>