Thomas Hargrove

Genealogybank.com became the nation's first ancestry research firm to stop posting Social Security numbers online, after two people complained their privacy was violated when the Social Security Administration falsely listed them as deceased.

"We made the decision several weeks ago that we would rather err on the side of privacy," said Daniel Jones, vice president of consumer products for Newsbank.com, which owns the research service based in Naples, Fla. It made the change Nov. 8.

The nation's largest commercial genealogy research company -- Ancestry.com -- earlier this week also stopped posting Social Security numbers at the request of federal lawmakers. Four Democratic senators, in a Dec. 1 letter to the five biggest services, urged that they withhold some information they get from the federal government under the Freedom of Information Act.

Esther Enos, 61, of Abilene, Texas, found out she was "dead" when her cellphone suddenly stopped working about six years ago.

"They cut off my service and I went to find out why," Enos told the Abilene Reporter-News in Texas. "They said I was using the Social Security number of a deceased woman."

Many others found out while shopping.

"Well, I'm standing right here in front of you," retired truck driver Johnny Blevins, 69, of Seymour, Tenn., told a Radio Shack clerk who said his Social Security number indicated that he is deceased. "He still wouldn't sell me a phone."

The Knoxville News Sentinel in Tennessee reported that the federal records' error resulted in Blevins' banking account being frozen.

Enos and Blevins are among 31,931 Americans discovered by Scripps Howard News Service in a search for errors in the massive Death Master File database maintained by the Social Security Administration.

The government makes about 14,000 such errors every year -- or about 1 out of every 200 death reports -- because of "inadvertent keying errors" by federal workers, according to Social Security spokesman Mark Hinkle.

WASHINGTON -- The Social Security Administration each month falsely reports that nearly 1,200 living Americans have died.

These clerical errors, found in a federal database ominously titled the "Death Master File," might be darkly humorous -- evoking Mark Twain's famous quip that death reports can be greatly exaggerated -- were not the consequences so severe.