How We Love Our Vital Records
Last night we published two new projects for keying.
Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Marriage Records, 1810-1973
As genealogists, we love our vital records! So, it is always exciting when a vital records project comes through the Ancestry World Archives Project because it means the index we are creating will be available for free to anyone who wants to access this information. This happens to be a collection of marriage records from 1810-1973. This is a giant chunk of time so watch for form type changes as we key our way through this collection. Even though the forms may morph from decade to decade, the basic information we are capturing should remain the same.
For complete project instructions check out the Project Page on the Wiki – Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Marriage Records, 1810-1973
If you come across any anomalies or different image types than the ones shown, feel free to edit the wiki page so everyone has that help available to them.
I have family from Cuyahoga County so you’ll probably see me keying quite a few of these records hoping to find my own relatives and doing my part to get this collection completed that much faster.
California Biographical Collection, Responses to Vital Record Inquiries
Sometimes vital records are not available from official sources for a variety of reasons – the government didn’t require them to be kept at that time, they have been lost or damaged, they haven’t been collected into a central repository, etc. That just means we have to get a little creative about how we collect vital information for genealogy research. As a genealogist I’ll take vital record sources wherever I can find them. This collection is one of those unique sources.
During the 1930s and 40s, the State of California received thousands of requests for verification of birth, marriage, naturalization or death information on certain individuals. Frequently the information people were seeking was three or four decades old, prior to regulated state registration (which started in mid-1905). The state responded to these queries, sometime with positive results, sometimes negatively.
These 3×5 cards are the state’s index to those queries and responses. We’ll be keying “event” information as we find it on these cards – birth, marriage, death, and naturalization/registration. This will create a great source for vital records information for a period of time prior to state registration.
For complete project instructions check out the Project Page on the Wiki: California Biographical Collection, Responses to Vital Record Inquiries
Hope everyone enjoys the new keying projects.
Until next time – Happy Keying!
P.S. – Not yet signed up to contribute to the Ancestry World Archives Project? You can register here, download the keying tool, and help us get these vital records out to the genealogy community even faster.
Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Marriage Records
Some of my relatives lived in that county so I am delighted to see this available for keying. I’m surprised to see this is rated “Very easy” as some of the handwritten names can be difficult to decipher and they often don’t appear on the dropdown menus. Even the typed New Zealand directories project is rated “Average”!!
A few small changes which would make this project quicker and easier to key:
1. Make the marriage year “sticky” so it automatically gets copied onto each new record, as all the records on the page will usually be from the same year (of course you would still be able to change the year if it isn’t the same)
2. Same goes for both the Prefix and the Spouse Prefix – a lot of the forms have a preprinted Mr and Miss so if you are keying those you are spending a lot of time keying them or F3-ing them on every record.
3. Make the surname dropdown menus come up with selection numbers like the ones for given name do. If the surname does come up on the menu we either have to stop typing and click on the right one, which slows us down, or we just continue typing to the end of the name.