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The following is a chapter from:
Trace Your Roots with DNA
by Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak and Ann Turner
(reprinted with permission)
ONLINE STATE VITAL RECORDS
The past few years have been tough ones for genealogists in terms of access to online vital records and indexes. For both legislative and fiscal reasons, many states have taken measures to restrict access to such databases (and documents they cover), making our research more challenging, but there's still more out there than many realize. As of this writing, for instance, a subscription to Ancestry.com provides at least some 20th-century indexes for 24 states. A few states, perhaps recognizing the income-generating potential of genealogical orders, have uploaded their own indexes.
Illinois, for instance, allows you to search for deaths that occurred from 1916 to 1950. Since the availability of these resources varies widely by state and is in such a constant state of flux, you may wish to bookmark Joe Beine's Online Searchable Death Indexes (www.deathindexes.com) to keep up to date. And if you can't find anything on the internet, it's always worth searching the Family History Library Catalog (www.familysearch.org) by state and county (look under the "vital records" category) to see if perhaps the library has any relevant microfilms.
The value of these fifth-place records is somewhat similar to the SSDI (e.g., narrowing the date of death to make it easier to find an obituary), but you may be able to obtain extra details of you qualify to obtain a copy of the relevant certificate from the state in question. For instance, a death certificate may give you the name of the informant, often a surviving spouse or child, or perhaps lead you to the cemetery where you can other family members buried in the same plot.
OTHER CENSUS INDEXES
Coming in a sixth place are other online census indexes - that is, the ones that have been indexed primarily by head-of-household, rather than by every name. At present, we tend to search the 1920 at www.ancestry.com, the 1910 at www.nygbs.org or www.godfrey.org, and the 1900 at www.godfrey.org or www.genealogy.com. All of these are fee-based but reward you with digitized images when you find a hit. Searching each of these, rather than jumping from 1880 to 1930, can help you flesh out the family tree and obtain additional names (e.g., a daughter born in 1891 who married before 1910 will appear with her birth family only in 1900). Earlier census years are also available at all three of these sites.
SEARCH ENGINES
When confronted with a situation where we have the name and place of residence of someone living today but cannot find an address or phone number, we often turn to search engines. Of course, you can try your favorite engine at any point in a candidate-hunt (especially if you're fortunate enough to be dealing with an unusual name), but we find them especially helpful for this particular roadblock.
In one recent effort, for instance, we had a name and town, but came up empty in the phone directories. A quick visit to www.google.com to enter these details produced an article about a policewoman in a local newspaper. She was the one we were looking for, and the article furnished enough information to make the final contact possible. The effectiveness of the name-location combination in circumventing the unlisted number phenomenon earned search engines the seventh position in our experiment.
OTHER SOURCES
Holding up the rear is a collection of resources that may be used for specific circumstances. This catch-all category includes newspapers, obituary and cemetery resources, county-based Web sites, public records (e.g., real estate, incorporations, licenses, etc.), and specialized sites, such as those geared towards military personnel and school buddies. Unfortunately, discussing all of these would easily fill another chapter, but we would like to mention that newspapers - loaded as they are with obituaries, marriage and birth announcements, business dealings, and sometimes amazingly trivial tidbits about your ancestors - are coming on especially strong with various vendors offering a growing number of digitized and fully searchable collections. In fact, we suspect that if we were to repeat our experiment in a year, they would emerge as their own category. Among our bookmarks for newspapers are www.newslibrary.com, www.newslink.org, www.ancestry.com (the Historical Newspapers collection), www.godfrey.org (for The New York Times and other major newspapers), and www.obitsarchive.com.
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