Tuesday, October 16, 2012

How Many Seaver Death Records Are There on Ancestry.com?

Have you entered the Ancestry.com Death Contest yet?  There are puzzles on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to solve.  There is a valuable prize for the Monday and Wednesday contests, and all entrants are entered for the grand prize of a free iPad on 2 November 2012.  Check it out at www.ancestry.com/deathcontest.

I was curious to see how many death records for my Seaver surname there were on Ancestry.com.  I entered "Seaver" in the Last name field of the Birth, Marriage and Death Records, with "Exact match" checked, and saw:


There are 24,647 matches for births, marriages and deaths for the exact "Seaver" surname in Ancestry's collections today.

I noted that:

*  Of the 5,085 Seaver matches in Massachusetts Town Records, 1620-1988, there are 800 death records

*  There are 1,588 Seaver names in the U.S. Obituary collection (not all of them are deceased Seaver folks, but many are!)

*  There are 1,403 entries for Seaver in the Social Security Death Index.

*  There are 707 Seaver names in the Historical Newspapers, Birth, Marriage and Death Announcements, 1851-2003 collection.  515 of them are in Obituaries.

*  There are 310 matches in the New Hampshire Deaths and Burials, 1654-1949 collection.

*  There are 278 matches in the California Death Index, 1940-1997

*  There are 268 matches in the Web: Obituary Daily Times Index, 1995-2011 collection.

*  There are 241 matches in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs BIRLS Death File, 1850-2010 collection.

*  There are 212 matches in the Web: Massachusetts Find A Grave Index, 1620-2011 collection.

And that's just in the first 20 collections listed.  Don't forget to look in all of the collections listed - not just the first 20.  I still have lots of work to do here!

Don't forget that Public Member Trees often have death dates and places (occasionally with source citations!) for persons - these can be used as finding aids or clues to records in other collections.

The point here is that Ancestry.com has MANY Death records in their 31,018 collections (as of today) - and they add collections on a regular basis.

I know that many searchers do not get the "Summarized by Category" view I have above - many searchers have the "Sorted by Relevance" view (see below):


You can click that dropdown box in the "Matches..." line to get to the "Summarized by Category" listings.

I rarely use the "Sorted by Relevance" list because there are often too many matches to easily digest and find the "nuggets" that I'm looking for in my searches.

So how many Death Records are there for your ancestral surnames?  Have you searched for all of your ancestors, and collateral family persons, on Ancestry.com?

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/10/how-many-seaver-death-records-are-there.html

Copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

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