Wednesday, April 20, 2016

New (?) New Hampshire Birth Certificate Record Collection on FamilySearch

I noticed that one of the new or updated record collections on FamilySearch today was the New Hampshire Birth Certificates, 1901-1915 today.  I think that this is a new collection, but I cannot check right now.


The description of this record collection is:

"Index and images of birth certificates from the New Hampshire Division of Vital Records in Concord. Records are arranged by year, certificate number, and name of child."

I entered "seaver" in the last name field on the screen above, and after clicking on "Search" I saw that I had 52 matches:



I clicked the first name on the list, and the screen expanded to provide the profile for this record:


The indexed information - name, event type, event date, event place, gender, father's name andm other's name were provided.  In addition, a source citation for the record summary was provided.
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On the right-hand side of the image above, I could View the original document, see information about the record collection, and attach the record summary to the FamilySearch Family Tree.

I clicked "View the original document" and saw:


The "birth certificate" was shown, along with the image index information below the image.

The record image provided more information, including the father's and mother's birthplace, age, occupation and residence, number of child, plus the attending doctor if there was one.

These "birth certificates" are not the birth certificates that most of us are accustomed to - they really are the birth record cards created by the town clerk every year and sent to Concord for the state birth record collection.  These cards are no different than the ones sent in before 1900 and provided on FamilySearch in the "New Hampshire Birth Records, Early to 1900" collection.

The name of this record collection should be "New Hampshire Birth Records, 1901-1915" rather than "New Hampshire Birth Certificates, 1901-1915."

Whatever the name, the record collection is very useful for researchers.  In the particular case above, I do not have Frank Seaver or his parents in my RootsMagic database for some reason.  Now I do!  But I'm searching for more information about the parents.

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Copyright (c) 2016, Randall J. Seaver

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