Let me put it this way. I spent the better part of last evening looking for Ruth Kirtley and her parents on the 1930 census. Ruth was born in 1927 and was a native of Horse Cave, Kentucky according to her 2007 obituary. So why can't I find them on the 1930 census?
The answer is simply this: The trained monkeys could not read Kirtley or even Kertley on the census and instead they read Keatley. Well, you can't do a soundex search for Kirtley and get Keatley. So I resorted to what I used to do before Ancestry and decided to search Horse Cave, Hart County, Kentucky in a line-by-line search of the index, looking for William and something that looks like Kirtley. What I found was William O Keatley, wife Louise and daughters Ann & Ruth. I looked at the census. It actually looked more like William P Kertley than Keatley. Kertley at least would have been found on a soundex search. Sigh.
Now to apply that principle to a death record search.
Copyright 2010, ACK for Gene Notes
