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Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Tuesday's Tip - Massachusetts Vital Records on FamilySearch.org

This week's Tuesday's Tip is:  Check out the FamilySearch collection of Massachusetts Vital Records.



To find the list of Massachusetts record collections on FamilySearch, go to https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/list and type "massachusetts" into the Search box in the upper left-hand corner.  The list of all collections with Massachusetts in the collection name appears.  

The vital record collections on the list today include:

*  Massachusetts Births and Christenings, 1639-1915 (4,639,049 records) - index with no images, partially derived from the FamilySearch International Genealogical Index (IGI)

*  Massachusetts Births, 1841-1915 (3,818,515 records) - yearly town birth registers submitted to the state, with images available

*  Massachusetts Deaths and Burials, 1795-1910 (1,545,640 records) - index with no images, partially derived from the FamilySearch International Genealogical Index (IGI)

*  Massachusetts Deaths, 1841-1915 (2,744,355 records) - yearly town death registers submitted to the state, images available

*  Massachusetts Death Index, 1970-2003 (2,037,187 records) - state index of deaths with no images.

*  Massachusetts Marriages, 1695-1910 (1,944,319 records) - index with no images, partially derived from the FamilySearch International Genealogical Index (IGI)

*  Massachusetts Marriages, 1841-1915 (1,538,139 records) - yearly town registers submitted to the state, images available

*  Massachusetts State Vital Records, 1841-1920 (browse only) - Massachusetts births, marriages and deaths for 1916-1920, plus state amendments to vital records from 1841 to 1920.  It has images but no index. 

Birth and marriage information before 1850 was extracted from the town record books and included in the FamilySearch IGI, and are included in those index collections.  There are other resources for them, especially the town vital record book series for many, but not all, Massachusetts towns.

The birth, marriage and death collections for the 1841 to 1915 time period are indexed from the images of the town registers submitted to the state every year.  The images provide much more information about the record than is indexed.  

The URL for this post is: http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/03/tuesdays-tip-massachusetts-vital.html 

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

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