To The Genealogist and the Courthouse
Counties' Vital Record Index Situations
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In planning your time at a courthouse, it helps to know ahead of time what kind of indexes you're going to work with. Information on this page will tell you what to expect.

The Typical Index Volume

The earliest index volumes, from before 1890 or so, are often actually in the same book as the records themselves. The "records" in these oldest books are not the original records, but registrations of births, marriages, and deaths. The indexes for these types of books will typically be the first bunch of pages at the front of the book. There will be a column of names, possibly two columns if it's a book of marriage records, then a column of dates, and finally a column of numbers which will refer to a page number in the same book. On each page you'll find a number of records with columns of data displayed across the page. It's not a problem to find the right record once you've got the page. The index pages in these books are always handwritten and usually hard to read, but luckily there are never many of these books in a given county.

In many counties, because of the difficulty of reading the earliest indexes, the index information from the first one or two books was rewritten along with the index for the subsequent volume of records in a more legible fashion. Check to see if this is the case with the earliest indexes before you scan the index at the front of the record book and then find out it would have been much easier to scan it as part of the later index that was created. Assume the clerks will not tell you which index you should look at. Many of them don't use the earliest indexes much themselves and so usually don't know precisely what indexes are there for the early records.

Also because of the difficulty of reading the earliest indexes, volunteers have gone into some counties and typed up the index information for at least the early volumes and printed it in fully alphabetized indexes for people to use right there at the courthouse. When that's available, it saves a lot of time. I've indicated below at which counties you'll find this. Sometimes the clerks will tell you about these helpful typed indexes, sometimes not. Be sure to look around where the indexes are to see if there are any of these alphabetical typed indexes. They're usually on regular 8 1/2" x 11" paper in some kind of binder.

Indexes from 1890 or so on up to the present are usually handwritten and normally pretty legible. The style of writing may be unusual, but the writing is neater and more regular than most of us could manage. Most counties began to type the indexes at some point, and at some the clerks even went back and retyped old index books into new ones. The typed index books are faster to scan for names than the handwritten ones, but the difference is not extreme when the handwritten indexes are as neatly done as one usually finds.

Marriage Indexes

Marriage indexes deserve a little extra explanation. There were five ways in which marriages were recorded in index volumes.

1. No brides listed at all, alphabetically or otherwise. The index lists only the grooms' names, sorted by the first initial of their last name. One simply cannot locate a marriage record with only the woman's name in this kind of index book. Luckily this is really not very common, and when it occurs it's usually only for one or two fairly small books of the earliest marriages. With luck there is a re-done alphabetical index that incorporates the marriages from that old book with the brides' names. The most egregious example of this sort of index is in Iron County, Michigan, where no brides are listed for any marriage in any time period and there are no alternative indexes.
2. Grooms listed alphabetically by first letter of their last name, brides' names listed next to the grooms' names but the index is not sorted by their last name. This is a format you find in many counties. If the book is literally called the grooms' index, then expect to find a brides' index in a separate book, with exactly the same marriages listed as in the grooms' index but this time sorted by the first letter of the bride's last name.
3. Each marriage listed twice in the same volume, one for a grooms' index and once for a brides' index. The left page of each pair of facing pages shows grooms' and brides' names for marriages sorted by the groom's last name, and the right facing page shows grooms' and brides' names for marriages sorted by the bride's last name. To find a bride's name, you first open the book to the initial letter of her last name, then scan the pages on the right side. To find a groom's name, open the book to the initial letter of his last name, and scan the pages on the left side. Each page has five columns, for groom, bride, date, volume, and page number. The marriages listed on the right page are completely different from the marriages listed on the left page, but the corresponding marriages are simply listed under a different letter because the spouse's last name started with a different letter. This is the most common format for marriage indexes that don't have grooms' index in one book and brides' index in a another. Once in a while there is a variant where pages indexing brides were added to the book at a later date, in which case those pages will be grouped together at the end of the original pages listing marriages in order by the grooms.
4. Each marriage listed twice in the same volume similar to the last method with both names indexed under the appropriate letter, but you don't find the both the bride's and groom's names for the marriages listed next to each other in either location. Typically, each page is split into two halves. The left half of the page lists grooms' names with date, volume and page number. The right half of the page lists brides' names with date, volume and page number. You open the index book up to the initial letter of the last name for the bride or groom, whichever you're looking for, and look down either the left column or the right column depending on whether it's the bride or the groom. This method is quite common as well.
5. Marriages entered only by the first letter of the groom's last name. Grooms and brides on alternating lines, with the bride's name indented slightly. This format is rarely seen, thank goodness - it is very difficult to scan these books for the bride's names.

Order of Entry in Indexes

No matter what the format of the entries in an index book or what kind of vital records you're talking about, the entries are always first grouped by the first one or two letters of the last name, and within that subgroup of records are entered in order by the date at which they were received at the county office. In Dane County, Wisconsin and a few other counties, the most common names in the county are given index pages of their own. In Milwaukee County, Wisconsin and a couple of other counties, the names are grouped by the initial letter of the last name and then further subdivided by the first vowel in the last name. But within the name group, the entries are orded by date of receipt at the office.

Other Index Systems

One county in Wisconsin has every index entry on a tiny strip of paper, and all the strips are inserted in alphabetical order into a revolving set of vertical pages from which the entries can be viewed. This is not very convenient mechanically, but anything that's fully alphabetical is a big improvement over names grouped only by first initial.

Marquette County, Wisconsin, has an unusual index system. Each of the dozens of books of records has its own index in the front of the book of records. That makes scanning the indexes inconvenient, but not tremendously more time-consuming than looking at normal index books. If you know the year of the record, there is one book per year so searching the index and getting the record is fast.

A few counties list all the records of a given type for a certain year and a single initial letter of the last name on a short piece of paper until the paper is full, then continue listing on the back and onto a second piece of paper if there were too many records that year to fit on one piece. Then all the small pieces of paper are put into a ringed binder. It's easy to find the records for a given year, but quite tedious to scan these indexes for all occurrences of a surname. The most time-consuming index of this type was in Saint Croix County, Wisconsin.

There are several counties, primarily in northern Wisconsin and Michigan, which type every entry on an index card, and then you use an index card file instead of a book to find entries. The advantage of this method is you never have to scan over names you don't care about - the cards are in alphabetical order and you just go directly to the name you're interested in. The disadvantage is that it's less convenient to check for entries with variant spellings. Also, if you have to leave the cards in the card file it's a little hard to copy the information to a separate piece of paper. But it works.

The ideal index is one that's fully alphabetized, and a few counties have done this, but mostly it's only the counties with small populations that have all the indexes alphabetized.

Adequacy of Indexes for Genealogical Research

The only indexes that are decidedly inadequate for any serious genealogical research are those in counties which have vital records which do not appear in any index. Next to those, the counties with no bride's indexes (index books showing marriages somehow grouped according to the bride's last name) are by far the most time-consuming to do research in. One can do research there for some tasks; other tasks - particularly those that involve looking for marriages of a number of women with different surnames - become impractical unless you live in the county.

Standard Index Situation Defined

The standard situation you'll usually encounter in counties in Wisconsin and northern Michigan is characterized by:

• names in index books grouped by first initial of last name
• brides' indexes available for all marriages
• the very oldest index books a little difficult to read
• handwritten indexes until around 1940 or so and typed after that
• no fully alphabetized indexes at all

In counties with this standard situation, if you are performing the task of scanning all the indexes for a particular surname and can scan quickly, you can assume it will take you on average about 1.5 hours to go through all the indexes once. From there, the amount of time it takes you will depend on how many records you found to look up and if you need to go back to the indexes multiple times for different people. Notable exceptions to that time estimate are Milwaukee County, Dane County, Winnebago County, and Brown County, Wisconsin, which all have good "standard situation" or better indexes but where the population is so large that it takes several hours to go through all the indexes just because there are so many volumes.

In other counties that don't have the standard index situation, it will take you longer - about 2 hours longer, usually - to search the indexes if there are no brides' indexes, and only about 30 minutes or less total to search if the indexes are fully alphabetized. In the list of counties with their index book situations below, I have noted only the counties whose situation diverges from the "standard" one outlined above. If a county does not appear in the list, assume you'll find the standard index situation if you go there.

Call for Help!

If you live in a county with poor indexes, you or your local genealogical society can do a lot for genealogists everywhere - including yourself, of course! - by taking the initiative to arrange to have volunteers create fully alphabetized indexes for your county. County officials will probably be glad to co-operate, especially if you consult them on how to verify your work and do what they suggest, so that they know the indexes will be reliable enough for them to use. The most problematic indexes are those in which brides' names are not listed, where there are some records that are unindexed, or where indexes are especially poorly organized. Those situations occur in these counties:

Counties With Serious Problems in Their Vital Record Indexes

Alger Co., MI
Bayfield Co., WI
Douglas Co., WI
Iron Co., MI
Outagamie Co., WI
Polk Co., WI
Rusk Co, WI

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