Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Mining the Connecticut Death Records Index for Ancestry Member Tree Persons

Ancestry.com added the "WEB: Connecticut Death Records Index, 1897-1968" record collection in July 2019.  The Ancestry collection provides search results, but does not show a record.  To search on the Connecticut Death Records Index site, the user has to click on a link to search for the record.

I searched this website earlier for Seaver people and found it difficult to use.  It has only a record summary and no image, and the information is exactly the same as on the Ancestry collection.

However, I had not searched the site for entries of all of the other persons in my Ancestry Member Tree.  So I used the Mining Ancestry.com Hints by Specific Record Collection hack.  I found the Ancestry record collection database number (dbas) was 70866, and modified the URL from the hack, and received only three results.  The bottom two are shown below:


I had only a death year for the last one - for Erma G. (Seaver) Cashman.  I clicked on the green "Review" button and saw the record summary page:

The page notes that:
"This record is not from Ancestry and will open in a new window. You may need to search for the record when the web page opens. For more information on web records, click here.
"You will need to log-in or register to save this record to your tree."
The URL for the Connecticut Death Records Index is https://www.ctatatelibrarydata.org/death-records/

I clicked on the URL and saw the top of the page:

Further down the page was a search field.  I entered "erma" in the "First Name" field, "cashman" in the "Last Name" field, and "1926" in the "Date" field and the information appeared in the line below the search fields:

I tried to use the "Search:" field on the right side of the screen and it didn't provide the record.  That field seems to work only with a Last Name without a First Name.  The user receives a list of 10 matches and has to advance to the next 10 matches if there are more than 10 matches.

The information from the website is exactly the same as on the Ancestry collection index.

The Connecticut Death Records Index site has a link to a list of Connecticut towns, and death certificate forms, that can be used to order a death certificate.

There is a similar "Connecticut Marriage Records, 1897-1968" collection on Ancestry.com, so I need to do the same process with it.  The database number is 70865.

Using the Mining hacking tool saved me hours of searching for people with Connecticut death dates between 1897 and 1968.  I had already accepted Ancestry Hints for this collection for many of my profiles in the Ancestry Member Tree, so they didn't show up on my list of Ancestry Hint results.

Unfortunately, the Mining Tool cannot find records for Ancestry Member Tree profiles that have not had a search for Hints from the profile or from a recent change. 

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Disclosure:  I have a complimentary Ancestry.com subscription at present.  In the past, Ancestry.com has provided travel reimbursement for me to attend meetings in Salt Lake City.

The URL for this post is:  https://www.geneamusings.com/2020/01/mining-connecticut-death-records-index.html

Copyright (c) 2020, Randall J. Seaver

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