Back to Work in Vital Records

After spending a nice afternoon doing long distance research with cousin Karen on Wednesday, I spent Thursday working in Vermont again. Ancestry.com has a nice set of Vital records for Vermont encompassing the years 1909-2008. Really. I have been working on Percival lines in Vermont for a long time and had been in the process of  following a female Percival line. Once I took my own good advice and started a Soundex search for Tinney, I soon realized I wanted Tenney instead.  It opened up an avenue of research that led to the History of Royalton, Vermont, which has been a treasure trove of what happened in this female line.

However, one should be prepared because for the most part what you will see are not the conventional birth, marriage or death certificates, nor are they ledger pages. 


<-- Birth record for Frank A. Judd - complete with birth date, parents and location.  Note that it gives mother's maiden name, parents' ages and father's occupation.

  --> Marriage record for the groom. It includes number of this marriage, age, occupation and parents. To get a complete record, you must pull the bride's record too. 



<-- The death record. Much later, you will find conventional death certificates, but this type of record is OK. Sometimes it will actually have the spouse's name on it too. 

All in all, it is like searching any other database. You will find the usual variations on spellings that searching using Soundex or wild cards just don't help that much. But worth searching for anyway. Now, if someone would just get the earlier records online, I could cross a lot of items off my Allen County Public Library to-do list!

Copyright 2010, ACK for Gene Notes