What do you want suggestions about? It sounds to me as if you already know
what you're going to do.

I suggest you do the list in Excel, entering first name and last name
and year of death in different columns.  If anyone ever wants to use the
data, eg, to see how many people died in 2000, then they will easily be
able to sort it however they want. If you want to add things like year
of birth in another column, it will be easy. Etc. You can collect the
data without worrying about whether you want to order the list by
Reverse Year of Death, or by Last Name.

Once your list is done, you can use copy and paste or mailmerge to bring
in just the information that you want to present into Word, and format
it nicely.