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The state department responsible for recording vital events frequently changes its name. A forty year old death certificate ordered today from the Department of Health might have been created by the Bureau of Vital Statistics. If you ordered the same death certificate in the 1990s, it might have come from the Registry of Vital Statistics. The certificates are exact copies of the original state record so one ordered in 1998 would be the same as one ordered in 2021.
For more recent records, the document is labeled with the name of the agency which originally created the record. On older records, the agency which created the record may not be stated at all (but can be determined using other resources).
For records I order from the state, I use the current name of the agency since that's the entity which provided me with a copy of the record and it's where someone needs to go if the want a copy for themselves. But what if I am not sure what the agency was called when I ordered the record (and can't remember exactly when I ordered it?) Or if I am using a digital image on FamilySearch and don't know the name of the agency at the time they provided the images?
wfall, the basic rule is to…
wfall, the basic rule is to cite what we're using and where we got it. If we order it from Agency XYZ, that used to be called QRS, we cite XYZ. If we obtain the record from an online provider, then we cite that website and say what we found there. We don't guess at where a record came from once-upon-a-time or where it might have been in a certain year, especially with vital records, because there can be differences in the content of the records held by different agencies or bureaus. For example: a localmaintained birth record, entered onto a form that bears the name of the state, could be more complete than the record obtained from the state bureau.
In the case of calling to order a record and we aren't sure who we called, then we simply say that in our citation. It's better to have incomplete information in a citation than wrong information based on guesswork or a faulty memory. We all make mistakes. We all have times when we forget to record something. An honest explanation is better than an error.