Genealogical Information in Birth, Marriage, and Death Records

Vital records are created for purposes important to the states and their communities. Unfortunately, those purposes don't include genealogy, even though states and counties do cooperate with genealogists in making the records available to the public when possible. As the states' needs change over time, so do the pieces of information, called "fields of data", that the states require to be collected from individuals and recorded in vital records. There are basic fields that have always been there and probably always will be: the name(s) of the individual(s) directly involved, the date of the event, and the place of occurrence. All other fields of information come and go depending on the time period in which the record was created, and may be collected in one state but not another.

Even when a state directs that certain information should be collected, various factors lead to the omission of data from some records. For example, a person getting married in times past might frequently not have known the name of one or both of their parents, so a parent's name field will be left blank. Sometimes individuals will even record data that was not actually required to be collected. For example, some officiants at wedding ceremonies would interpret the "place of marriage" to include the venue of the ceremony and would write it down, though the state might only require that the city or township be recorded. Thus, vital records may have a little something extra waiting for a genealogist to dig up.

If you are looking for genealogical information on a person and wonder if it's worthwhile finding a particular record, it is helpful to know what is likely to be found on the record. I have collected many vital records from different counties in Wisconsin and northern Michigan, and below you can see what genealogical information you will find in records from different time periods, and with what frequency it appears on or is omitted from individual records. If you are looking for a specific piece of information - birthdate, for example - you'll want to know whether the vital record would contain that particular data item. It's a little hard to discern that from what you'll find below, but you can look elsewhere to find a list of data fields and frequency of occurrence on different records.

In the information on these pages I have named all the fields of interest that appear on the records, and I have calculated the percentage of records that actually have the information filled in on the record. On this page, for later time periods I saved time by only listing what was changed from the previous time period; I stopped listing all the fields that were present. I determined the time periods by observing abrupt changes in frequency of reporting data, or noting gain or loss of a data field. The time periods probably correspond with revised directives from the state government or with the issuing of new forms for recording vital information to be used in all counties.

The information for Michigan is based only on records from Upper Peninsula counties, with about 80% of the records being in Houghton, Marquette, and Gogebic counties. The information for Wisconsin is based on records from nearly all counties, distributed somewhat according to county population, except that Milwaukee County records are excluded from statistics. All records are for the surname Harrington, which could introduce some ethnic bias to the data to the extent that reporting depended in the early days on the inclination of the individuals involved. A large proportion of Harringtons have Irish immigrant roots and most of the remainder were Yankees from the East.

Statistics are based on what I copied from records, not on the records themselves. If something was totally illegible, it counts as missing information here. If I forgot to copy something off the record, it counts as missing information - but I tried very hard to be careful about that!

Since the early twentieth century death records in Michigan and Wisconsin state whether the deceased was in the military service, but I didn't note exactly when that began to be recorded.

Many older death records record the age at death in years, months, and days. Those records may or may not record the birthdate. However, the birthdate may be calculated from the age and the date of death. Some Web sites will calculate the birth date from the age for you automatically. You can assume the age at death in years, months and days was originally calculated from the birthdate without use of a computer, so an error is possible. In event of a conflict between age to month and day and the recorded birthdate, you can probably assume the birthdate is correct; except if the age is only in years and the year of birth conflicts, you can't draw a conclusion about whether the age or the year of birth is correct from the death record alone.

When a person was divorced and remarried, there is often an indication of that in the later marriage record(s). Either the record will explicity state whether it is the person's first, second, etc. marriage, or, for women, their name will be given as "Mrs. so-and-so", or, again for women, their last name will not match that of their parents. However, there are a goodly percentage of marriages for which one cannot tell if it is the person's first marriage or not, especially for men. I did not note data for or calculate statistics regarding apparent remarriages.

Differences in statistics for reporting brides' and grooms' parents' names illustrate the amount of variation in the statistics you might see depending on exactly which records you look at to collect the statistical data. Normally all parents' names are reported if any at all are reported, but in early days people often died young and their children didn't always know one or both of their parents' names.