Who Do You Think You Are?: The Essential Guide to Tracing Your Family History by Smolenyak Megan

Author:Smolenyak, Megan [Smolenyak, Megan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Reference
ISBN: 9781101163016
Goodreads: 7871010
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2009-12-31T08:00:00+00:00

IS THERE A SHORTCUT?

Over the last few years, a growing number of vital records indexes—and sometimes even the records themselves—have been placed online. At the moment, this is true of more than thirty states, and especially pronounced with death records, which raise fewer privacy considerations (though some birth and marriage records can also be found on the Internet). Quite a few are provided directly by the state or county, while others can be accessed through FamilySearch or subscriptions to commercial genealogy sites. A surprising number are free, but some cost up to fifteen dollars plus a processing fee. Even when there’s a fee involved, though, there’s nothing quite like the instant gratification of finding and downloading your great-granddad’s death certificate at 2:30 in the morning!

You’ll want to seek out online indexes even when you expect to order a certificate the traditional way. If you find one, you’ll be able to determine in advance whether the item exists, and the index will frequently give you an exact date (when you might have just had a ballpark guess) and certificate number you can add to your order. This might result in faster service, and also helps avoid frustrating “not found” situations that can occur when, say, a record is not listed under the expected spelling. Researching in person at a state archives, I once discovered the death certificate for one of my great-grandmothers, Mary Reynolds, after receiving one of those dreaded “not found” letters in response to a request I had mailed to the state. She had been recorded as Mary Ryn olds, and the missing “e” from her surname was enough to keep her record hidden even though I knew the approximate date of her death. Had I been able to search online and find the certificate number, the record would have been supplied the first time.

How do you find out what exists online? This can be a tad challenging because the terrain is constantly shifting, but I have a handful of Web sites I rely on. I’ve already mentioned the Social Security Death Index and www.deathindexes.com by Joe Beine, but Joe also offers a companion set of links for online birth and marriage records indexes (go to http://deathindexes.com/sites.html and select Birth, Marriage and Divorce Records).

Another almost accidental resource sports a cumbersome Web address (http://users.rcn.com/timarg/PaHR-Access-states.htm) but is quite handy. A gentleman by the name of Tim Gruber is campaigning to encourage the state of Pennsylvania to relax its unusually restrictive access to death certificates. As part of that initiative, he’s created a page with links to others states that have already put older death certificates online—either on their own Web sites or in partnership with one or more genealogical companies or organizations. As of this writing, that includes a dozen—Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia—with several others reportedly in the process of doing the same. Also included are several localities such as Shelby County, Tennessee, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It’s unclear how

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