Check the Index

The Internet has revolutionized genealogical research, and its greatest treasures are historical records that have been indexed. Instead of combing through physical pieces of paper in the county clerk’s office or rolling through reels and reels of microfilm in the library basement, one can search online and in many cases find links to images of the actual birth record or census report or marriage license.

But somebody has to do the actual indexing, and that's what I've been doing for the past week, as part of a campaign by the FamilySearch.com* web site to make more records available to online researchers. They provide the images of the old documents, and I transcribe what I see.

I have done almost 1000 Cook County, Illinois, birth certificates for 1936 and 1937, including some births that occurred at West Suburban Hospital in Oak Park, where I was born and also had my tonsils out.

What I’ve enjoyed even more, however, is transcribing mortality schedules, which are supplements to the federal census. As they went from door to door interviewing people for the census, the enumerators were required to ask if anybody in the household had died during the preceding year. If so, the deceased’s name, age, race, place of birth, month of death, and cause of death were recorded.

The ones I did were from 1860, 1870, and 1880. The various causes of death are fascinating and include some of those old-fashioned terms like dropsy, consumption, and childbed fever, plus things nobody dies of any more (usually), such as typhoid, scarlet fever, small pox, diphtheria, and cholera. In Shelby County, Illinois, in 1870, there were an inordinate number of infants who died of hives.

There were accidents (kicked by horse, run over by wagon), one suicide by shooting, and there's no wonder that some of these things could kill you: amputation of arms, paralysis of bowels, and cancer in the eye.

In one 1880 schedule, the cause of death of a 64-year-old man was given as “old age.”

I guess I'm on borrowed time.

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*FamilySearch is “a service provided by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."