Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Tuesday's Tip - Search Indiana Vital Records on Ancestry.com

This week's Tuesday's Tip is:  Search 20th century Indiana Births, Marriage and Death certificates on Ancestry.com.

Ancestry.com recently added three new databases for Indiana vital records:

*  Indiana Birth Certificates, 1907-1940 (7,077,520 records)

*  Indiana Marriage Certificates, 1958-2005 (8,081,577 records)

*  Indiana Death Certificates, 1899-2011 (16,683,304 records)

The record counts probably are for the number of indexed names in the database, and not the number of individuals born, married or died.  For instance, the information for the Birth records indicate that there are records for over 2 million births, not 8 million births.

I quickly looked for Seaver entries - there are 29 birth entries, 80 marriage entries, and 97 death entries,.  Here is one of the death certificates for a Seaver daughter:


I did not have this person in my database.  I did have her father, Wayne Seaver in my database, but only as a child of his parents based on census records.  Records like this extend my database another generation or two, depending on the Suggested Records and Hints provided by Ancestry.com.

I have a lot to do in these three databases - I can mine them for Seaver (and Seaver spelling variants), Auble, Carringer, Vaux and other ancestral surnames.  I will add the information to my database in RootsMagic, including source citations and notes.  Then I will sync the persons with the FamilySearch Family Tree, add them to my Ancestry Member Tree, and add them to my MyHeritage tree when sync becomes available to Ancestry and MyHeritage.

I already checked to see if my 2nd great-grandmother Sarah (Knapp) Auble (1818-after 1900) was included, and I don't think she was.  I still think she died in Illinois after 1900 and before 1910.

If you have Indiana ancestry, then I encourage you to search for your Indiana people in these databases.

There is also a set of Indiana Marriages, 1811-2007 with record images available for free on FamilySearch.

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Copyright (c) 2016, Randall J. Seaver

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2 comments:

Geolover said...

Amy Johnson Crow has a pretty comprehensive look at Ancestry's major muddle with the new 20th-century Indiana Death Records database, and some suggestions for possible workarounds:

http://www.amyjohnsoncrow.com/

The principal (but not the only) problem is that women's maiden names are not indexed. Who did the indexing is not clear.

Sharon said...

Actually, mother's names are indexed with the father's surname (i.e. woman's married name), however the death certificates themselves do show maiden name. This means that you cannot search using the mother's maiden name. The Indiana Births that I looked at had the same problem.