Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Finding U.S. Vital Records on Archives.com

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Continuing my series exploring the databases available on commercial site www.Archives.com, I wanted to determine what United States Vital Records were available on the website. 

The list of Vital Record collections (I did a "Birth" search on the Collections page) showed 60 collections (including not U.S. collections);  it showed 71 "Marriage" collections; it showed 63 "Death" collections;  it showed 27 "Divorce" collections.  I'm not going to list them all - an interested reader can do these searches also.

I was most interested in the California collections, and how the results are presented.

1)  For California Births, the collection is described as:

California Birth Index, 1905 to 1995, 24,112,453 records
California Department of Public Health, Center for Health Statistics
The California Birth Index was recorded by the California Department of Public Health, Center for Health Statistics. It contains over 24 million records, including these fields (when available): name, birth date, gender, mother's maiden name, and county of birth.

The search page for the California Birth Index has these fields:

*  First Name [choice of Exact or not]
*  Last Name (required) [choice of Exact or not]
*  Middle Name
*  Maiden Name
*  Location (required)
*  Event Type:  Birth
*  Year: 
*  +/- [choices of 0, 1, 2, 5, or 10 years]

I put Last Name = "seaver," checked the "Exact" box, and saw:


After clicking on the blue "Search" button, I received 254 matches:


The matches were listed alphabetically by first name. 

Unchecking the "Exact" box showed the same 254 matches. No wild cards are permitted for the surname search (only letters, spaces and dashes).  The Birth Year range worked as expected.

I checked this same California Birth Index on Ancestry.com, using an exact search for Last Name = "seaver."  There were 490 matches.  An inspection of the list showed there were 261 results with Last Name = "seaver," and the rest had Maiden Name = "seaver."  The results order was by birth date.  I did not compare both list to see where the 2.7% difference in matches occurred. 

On the FREE Family Tree Legends site, this California Birth Index, 1905-1995 has 260 matches for a Last Name = "seaver" Exact name search in birth date order.  A "Soundex" search for "seaver" on this site resulted in 260 matches also.

I found my own birth record, and clicked on the linked name (I could have clicked on "View Full Record") and saw:


The information provided by the record includes:

*  First Name
*  Middle Name
*  Last Name
*  Gender
*  Birth Date
*  Birth Location (note that this is a County, not a City - Archives.com does not specify this)
*  Record Type
*  Mother's Maiden Name
*  Collection
*  Certificate (a link to buy a birth certificate at an exorbitant price is provided)
*  Source Information

For comparison purposes, the Name, Gender, Birth Date, Birth County and Mother's Maiden Name are provided in the Ancestry.com collection, plus Source Information. 

2)  For California Marriages, the Archives.com database description is:

California Marriage Records, 1960 to 1985, 4,680,201 records
California Department of Health
This collection of California marriage records was provided by the California Department of Health. It contains data from marriage certificates registered in California from 1960 to 1985.
A search of this database for Last Name = "seaver" with the Exact box checked provided 148 matches, listed alphabetically by first name.  A search on this same database on Ancestry.com provided 310 matches (155 with "seaver" as a last name).  The information provided on Archives.com is comparable to that provided by Ancestry.com.
3)  For California Deaths, the Archives.com database description is:
California Death Index, 1940 to 1997, 9,289,235 records
California Department of Public Health, Center for Health Statistics
The California Death Index was recorded by the California Department of Public Health, Center for Health Statistics. It contains over 9 million records, including these fields (when available): name, gender, death date, death location, birth date, birth location, mother's maiden name, and father's last name.
A search of this database for Last Name = "seaver" with the Exact box checked provided 164 matches, listed alphabetically by first name. A search on this same database on Ancestry.com provided 278 matches (162 with "seaver" as a last name, the other matches are "seaver" with a maiden name).  The same database on Family Tree Legends has 287 matches, including maiden name entries.  The same database on Rootsweb.com has 166 matches for Last Name = "seaver."  The information provided on Archives.com is comparable to that provided by the other databases
4)  For California Divorces, Archives has two databases:
California, San Diego Divorce Records, 1979 to 1999, 1,397,948 records
San Diego Superior Court
This collection of San Diego, California divorce records was provided by the San Diego Superior Court. It contains data from 1979-1999.
California, Kern County Divorce Records, 1990 to 2004, 32,066 records
Superior Court of California, County of Kern
This collection of divorce records from Kern County, California was provided by the Superior Court of California, County of Kern. It contains data from 1990 to 2004.
Ancestry.com has a California Divorce Index, 1966-1984 so it cannot be compared to the Archives.com databases.
5)  Interested readers can do the same comparisons for other states. 
For the California Birth, Marriage and Death indexes on Archives.com, the results provided are equivalent to those provided on other websites, although they are in a different order.  The Birth Year filter works well.
6)  My concerns about the Archives.com databases are:
*  There is no "non-exact" search capability (I got the same number of matches whether the Exact box was checked or not).
*  There is no "wild card" capability to catch name spelling variations
*  Archives returns a slightly lower number of matches than a similar search on other databases.
Disclosure: Archives.com provided a free subscription to their collection at the SCGS 2011 Jamboree which I appreciate. This did not influence my statements in this blog post, but it did enable them to be made!

The URL for this post is: http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/01/finding-us-vital-records-on-archivescom.html
Copyright (c) Randall J. Seaver, 2012

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