To The Genealogist and the Courthouse

Problems Using Wisconsin and Michigan Upper Peninsula Vital Records for Genealogy

by James Harrington

Once you begin to collect vital records of relatives' life events, it probably won't take you long to realize they aren't the end-all and be-all of solutions for the genealogist. The information you find is great, but frustrations abound. I'll list many of the reasons below, and you'll see you'd best be prepared not to find the information you thought you'd find, or for finding it to be a harder job than you wish. Nevertheless, the vast majority of vital records are easily found and are indeed a treasure trove of information, so don't let any of the potential problems deter you from making an effort to find them!

The explanation of a problem in the list below may include workarounds for the problem or list specific counties where you may encounter the problem. Follow this link for details on indexes that cause problems in specific counties.

Events in the distant past were not reported

Finding a county record for a birth that occurred in 1940 is usually a piece of cake, at least if you know where it occurred. Finding a county record for a birth that occurred in Wisconsin in 1840, on the other hand, just isn't going to happen except by some miracle. First of all, the State of Wisconsin didn't even exist until 1848. There were a very few civil districts in the Wisconsin Territory that recorded births, but those places of recording were far from most other locations in the territory and travel was difficult. There was no legal requirement to report births to these old civil seats, and most births just didn't get officially recorded anywhere until later in the 1800s. The only three county seats in the state that do record some births occurring in Wisconsin Territory or the state before 1850 are Green Bay (Brown Co.), Milwaukee (Milwaukee Co.), and Whitehall (Trempealeau Co.). In the case of deaths, Milwaukee did not record them prior to 1850, but besides Green Bay and Whitehall, three other locations recorded some very early deaths: Grantsburg (Burnett Co.), Port Washington (Ozaukee Co.), and Waupaca (Waupaca Co.). Across the state of Wisconsin, marriages tended to be recorded earlier than births or deaths, so there is some small chance a marriage you are looking for will have been recorded even in the earliest days of the state. The Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services website lists the years in which the earliest vital records have been recorded in each Wisconsin county. Understand that in most cases the recording by the counties was very sparse until much later than the dates listed on that Web page.

Some events in the not-so-distant past were not reported

Many of us had grandparents who were born between 1880 and 1910, and so this hardly feels like the distant past to us. However, there was no law requiring strict reporting of all births, marriages, and deaths in Wisconsin until 1906, or in Michigan until 1900. Prior to that, reporting increased throughout the late 1800s into the 20th century, but you are as likely not to find your grandparent's birth record prior to 1906 (Wisconsin) or 1900 (Michigan) as you are to find it. Marriages were reported much more often than births before the year reporting was required. Deaths seem to have been reported even less frequently than births. After 1906/1900 there was a short transition time as people got used to the new requirements, and after 1915 (or earlier, depending on the county) you can probably expect to find the records you're looking for. Yet even then, there will be rare surprises, where a birth or death record you should have found simply won't be there for some reason. Its absence could be due to one of the reasons given below, but if you're quite certain it should be in the county where you are looking and it isn't, and the date is after the year vital records had to be reported, it might be worthwhile to check whether the record is perhaps at the state-level vital records office, and somehow out-of-place or otherwise just not present at the county office. Theoretically this should never happen, but the offices are run by humans who must be allowed to make mistakes on occasion! One should assume this is a situation that could arise. If a post-1906/1900 record is in the county index but not in the book of records where indicated, and an office clerk confirms it is indeed missing from the record book, it definitely should be available at the state vital records office.

The record may not be in the county it seems it should be in

Many people believe that a death record or birth record will be found in the county in which the family or individual lived, but Wisconsin and Michigan law has always specified that vital records are to be recorded in the county in which the events occurred, not the county in which the person lived. If a person was in a hospital in a different county and passed away there, the death record is expected to be found in the county where the hospital was, not where the person lived. If there was a death due to automobile accident or heart attack away from home, the death is recorded in the county where it occurred. Similarly, if a mother was away from home in another county when her child was born, the birth record should be found in the county where the child was born. Unfortunately, it's hard to find those records that aren't where you expect them to be! Start looking where you expect to find a record, but if you don't find it, check adjoining counties. If you have an obituary, look in the county where the obituary says the person died before looking where they lived.

Luckily, when a non-resident of a county dies or non-residents have a child, many counties send a "courtesy copy" of the vital record to the home county of the deceased or of the parents of the newborn. The home county may then file the record as though the event had occurred in their own county, and so the record will still be found where most people would expect it to be. However, not all counties send courtesy copies because it is an extra expense and is not required, and not all counties, receiving courtesy copies from elsewhere, add the copy of the record to their books. Just be glad when you find an out-of-county record in the county where you expect it to be.

In addition, there seems to be a rule, at least in Wisconsin, that parents can file a record of their child's birth in their home county rather than the county of the child's birth. The place of birth will correctly be listed, but there will be no record of the birth in the county of birth; instead it is in the county of the parents' residence. Perhaps this is related to having to report the name of the child some days after the birth if the child's name hasn't been decided already by the time he or she is born. This situation with birth records normally doesn't happen, but it does occur sometimes, so if you know where the child was born and it's not necessarily where the parents lived, and you don't find the birth record where the child was born, try looking in other counties where the parents may have lived. In a case like this, it would be helpful to find a newspaper birth announcement that gives the place of residence of the parents!

Rarely, marriages are not reported in the county in which the ceremony takes place, but are instead reported in the county of residence of the bride and groom if it is different. Perhaps this occurs when a marriage license is obtained prior to knowing where the marriage will take place, the marriage is outside of the county that issued the license, and then the information is returned to the county in which the license was issued. Whatever the reason, this can make finding a marriage record difficult. Luckily it very rarely happens, and in many cases a county will send a courtesy copy of a marriage of non-residents to the county of residence of the couple. But if you know where a marriage occurred and you don't find a record of it in that county, it's worth casting about in adjacent counties.

One common reason for vital records not being in the county in which one expects is due to the way counties are created. When a state is first created, it may have fewer counties than it does later in its existence. Over time, county boundaries may change - new counties are carved out of pre-existing counties, and pieces of land may be transferred from one county to another. This isn't likely to happen in the 21st century, but it did happen frequently long ago. Vital records are recorded in the county in which the event occurred - the county the specific location was in at the time of the event. If an event occurred in county A in 1857 and that city later became a part of county B in 1875, the record will typically not be transferred over to the records office of county B. It was still be found in county A. Years later in the present day you may go to county B looking for the record because that's where the city is now, and it won't be there. If you are looking for an early record and you know approximately where the event occurred, be sure to find out what county that location was in at the time of the event. The listing of earliest records in various counties in Wisconsin may be especially useful in this regard - if an event occurs before the earliest vital record recorded in a county, it may be that the county didn't exist before that date, and you should check to see if perhaps it was recorded in a different county which contained the locality at that earlier time. (But note, the years given are not necessarily totally accurate. The Brown County Web site, for example, says that the earliest birth record for Brown County dates from 1746.) Barring a more convenient source of information, official county Web sites often tell when the county was created and what county or counties it was created from.

The record you want may have been destroyed in a fire

There is hardly a fire in a courthouse every year, but considering the number of counties there are in Midwestern states and that vital records have resided in the courthouses in most counties for over a century, it's not suprising that some records have been destroyed by catastrophic events. Remember that virtually the entire 1890 U.S. census was destroyed in a fire! When there is a fire in a courthouse, some records may survive while others are lost, or perhaps only the indexes survive but the actual records are lost, in which case the names of the individual(s) involved and the date of the event are saved but all additional detail is lost. In Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, records have been lost from these counties due to fires:

Alger County, MI - water damage in 1970 made some index entries illegible, effectively ending anyone's access to the affected records until an index is reconstructed.
Marquette County, MI - fire destroyed nearly all records from 1880-1890, but indexes remain. Earlier and subsequent records were unaffected.
Dodge County, WI - fire in 1877 destroyed all pre-existing records, but indexes remain.

Those remarks pertain only to birth, marriage, and death records. Divorce, probate, and land records may not have been affected - you'd have to inquire at the courthouse.

The record you want may be in the index, but not be locatable

If a record is in the index and you can't find it where it says it should be, the first thing to do is double-check the volume and page number. When I have encountered this situation, it's nearly always been the my own fault, from misreading the index, copying the location from the wrong line of the index, etc. If you're completely sure you have the correct reference, get assistance. You might check the record before or after to see if it's a case of misindexing by one page, but you should not page through the book to try to locate the record yourself. Normally a clerk will be willing to help locate the record.

If a book is missing from the shelf, probably one of the clerks has it at their desk. Usually they can make it available to you. In Rusk County, Wisconsin, one very early book of records may have been totally lost. I was unable to locate the volume an index entry referred to, and two clerks were also unable to locate the volume and had no idea where it might be.

The record you want may have been left out of the index

In both Michigan and Wisconsin, rules of access prohibit members of the public from paging through record books looking for records of interest. This is because of privacy issues and to keep the wear and tear on old paper records to a minimum. One does access records by page numbers, so finding the right record naturally has one glancing briefly at numerous irrelevant pages, but it is simply not allowed to look at every record to find the particular one you want. The only approved method for finding records is to look in a name index. Every record is supposed to have a corresponding entry in an index which gives you a volume and page number or a record number. However, the indexes are created by fallible human beings who have created millions of individual index entries over the last 125 years and more. There should be verification procedures in place to ensure that all records are properly indexed, but in fact on occasion there simply is no entry for the record you want in the index even though the record does exist, if only you could find it.

It is impossible to determine whether a record you thought would be there is "missing in action" from this cause. Records in books are not arranged in alphabetical order or in order by date of the event; they are simply put in books in the order in which the paperwork was received at the office. Thus, it is extremely difficult to find a specific record without the index entry. Clerks don't have time to page through books for you looking for a record on the off-chance that somebody accidentally left it out of the index, because 99% of the time the record is missing just because it's not there and any search through the record book is a big waste of time. Office personnel will simply refuse to perform that search. You might be willing to perform the search yourself, but the rules prohibit you from looking for a record by paging through a record book, period. For all practical purposes, any record that is not listed in the index is not there and you will have to accept that. Either the event occurred somewhere else (most likely in the 20th century) or the event did occur there but the record is not accessible either because no official record was ever created or the record was not included in the index.

Sometimes new indexes are created, either by the county personnel or by volunteers. Usually the old indexes are not discarded, because the irony of creating new indexes is that the new indexes will probably accidentally leave a few records unindexed as well, it will simply be different records than before. The offices usually retain the old indexes as a backup, or only use the new indexes as a backup. If a record is missing that you think should be there, and there are two sets of indexes covering the time period of interest for some reason, be sure to check both indexes. With luck the name may appear in the second index you check.

Most counties do not have these additional index volumes, but be aware that half the time, when a clerk shows you where the indexes to the county vital records are, they won't point out the existence of a second set of indexes even if they are sitting right there for you to use. Also be aware that, nearly invariably, the indexes they don't point out are the newer ones, which are usually completely alphabetized and by far the most convenient! The clerk is not being deliberately obstructive - usually the second index has been created by a volunteer, and its correctness has not been verified by the county personnel. The clerk is simply responsibly pointing out the "official" indexes they use themselves, which have been at least partially verified and as far as they know are the most reliable indexes for finding names. However, as a genealogist you should always be sure to look around for alternative index volumes you could use - the alternatives are usually created by a genealogist for genealogists and can be huge timesavers, aside from the issue of finding entries missing from the index of first choice.

Many counties don't index marriages by bride's name

If you are looking for an entry for a marriage in an index, you'll normally be in a good situation if you know the groom's name. If you know both bride's and groom's names it doesn't hurt, and on the rarest occasion, it may help - if both brides and grooms are indexed, once in a great while the person who made the index entry would forget to make the entry for both the bride and the groom. Then you might not find an entry for the groom's name in the index, for example, but if you look for the bride's name in the brides index you'll find the entry.

Sometimes all you know is the bride's name, though. Or perhaps you are looking for all the marriages of people with a given surname, and first you check for the men as grooms, then you check for the women as brides. All counties will have the grooms names roughly alphabetized in a marriage index so you only need to look through a few pages of the index for them, but unfortunately many will have no index sorted by the bride's name. This makes a lot more work for you. In cases like this, some people automatically think, "Oh, I can't find the marriage in this index! I can't search this huge book with the bride's names in totally random order!" If you run into this situation, don't be discouraged. To be sure, the job of finding the bride's name grows dramatically if you can't just look up her last name in an index sorted by last name of the bride. However, when that isn't available, the job doesn't turn into one of infinite time - it only seems so before you look.

Actually, there are no Wisconsin or northern Michigan counties without bride's indexes for which the entire marriage index cannot be searched for the bride's name in a reasonable amount of time. The job becomes one of potentially looking at the entry for every marriage that ever was recorded in the county, and this sounds impractical, but if you scan quickly you can go through an entire volume of an index, which usually contains about 300 pages of marriage entries with maybe 40 names per page, in twenty to thirty minutes. There may only be two volumes to the marriage index, or there may be ten, but I always found the total amount of time required to scan marriage indexes for a surname in the absence of a brides index to be less than four hours, and usually only 1.5 to 3 hours, tending towards the shorter time period. It's boring and requires maintaining focus so that you don't scan the whole index and then miss the marriage(s) you are looking for, but it's very doable. But to be sure, scanning for brides where there is no brides index is not one of the more enjoyable aspects of genealogy. Considering that tasks to be performed with the indexes by office staff were presumably the same in all counties, one certainly wonders why some counties thought brides indexes were important, and others decided not to maintain brides indexes at all.

When there is no bride's index, more often than not it's only for one or two of the earliest volumes of indexes, and then the more recent indexes do index the brides. You can click here to see the status of indexes in Wisconsin and upper Michigan counties in 2004/2005, with special attention given to availability of bride's indexes. Click here for hints on scanning indexes rapidly.

If you live in a county with no marriage index for the brides or only a partial index for brides, you have an opportunity to perform probably the most useful service for your fellow genealogists there could be - take the initiative to organize a project to create a brides index. Many of the brides indexes that do exist in various counties were created by volunteers, either individuals or members of the local genealogical society. All you have to do is scan an entire marriage index for a bride's name once, and you will immediately appreciate the benefit that would be realized by nearly every genealogist who ever steps into that office if you or your local genealogical or historical society created that index. Over time, you will surely benefit from other's work. There is hardly a better way to repay others for their efforts than to assume responsibility in seeing that a fully alphabetized bride's index is created for your county's vital records office. To estimate the time required, assuming you have access to a computer and can type, count the total number of pages in the index books and multiply by maybe 1.25. That would give a rough estimate of the total number of hours required, if you only retype what's already in the index into a spreadsheet that can be sorted and reprinted in alphabetical order. For a more accurate estimate, just type up a few pages and see how long that takes, then extrapolate to the total number of pages you intend to work on. Even if you only manage to get out a brides index for a few years of marriages, it still saves time and it's worth doing. Take time to consult with others who have performed the task in other counties to hear their suggestions on what is most useful to do while creating the index so you are sure the result of your work will be as useful as can be given your time constraints. Most county vital record offices would be glad to work with you because their own staff will benefit, too, if your index is as accurate as they need for their work. They may be able to suggest how to verify your work for accuracy, which is equally important for them and for your fellow genealogists.

Some counties' indexes don't list brides names at all for some marriages

One of the most frustrating situations you can encounter in a vital records office is to have the name of a bride, but no groom's name, and then open an index book and find that only the groom's names are listed - the bride's names don't even appear in the index. You may be willing and able to spend the time needed to search the entire index for the bride's name, but the task is made flat out impossible by the total absence of the brides' names from the index. Luckily, this situation is very rarely encountered. The author has encountered brideless marriage indexes in these Wisconsin and upper Michigan counties:

As with counties with no brides indexes but with indexes that at least list the brides, your local volunteer activity to create marriage indexes that list brides in these counties would have a great impact on your fellow genealogists as well as your own work in these counties. If you can organize a project to create marriage indexes for brides in any of these counties, you will certainly be doing your part to make genealogy easier for everyone and repaying volunteer work others have done for your benefit.

The index to the records you want might not be available

There is only one approved way to get at courthouse records - through indexes. One would naturally assume, then, that all the records are indexed, except for the odd record that might inadvertently have been left out of the index. However, there are two special cases in which there is no index book corresponding to the records. The first is the basic case for where there is an entire book of records, for which no index exists. Because the rules state that records can only be accessed through an index, such a book of records would be inaccessible to the public. Every courthouse has done their best to see that all records are indexed, but in fact the author discovered two books of records at Douglas County, Wisconsin, none of which were indexed. The books were sitting in a display case in the Register of Deeds office, and it turned out that they were the first book of recorded marriages and the first book of recorded deaths for the county. The Registrar of Deeds was not aware that these two book of official records existed until the books were brought directly to her attention; they had probably been sitting in the display case for many years. The records were unindexed. Hopefully an index will be created, but until such a time nobody can access those early records. (If you need them, contact the Register of Deeds in Douglas County and request that an index be created. Better yet, volunteer to create an index - it would only take a few hours and spreadsheet software on a laptop computer.)

There is another type of vital record which does not appear in vital record indexes. The very earliest marriages are usually short hand-written documents from a minister or justice of the peace that document a marriage. Where these documents exist, they have usually been collected into some book of marriages and indexed appropriately, but in some counties these documents were originally recorded as deeds or as some kind of miscellaneous document or even as probate documents and were never collected into a single book of marriage records and placed with the regular books of marriages that were created later. In one county in Wisconsin, these old marriages were collected and an index was created, but the collection was not placed with the marriage records in the Register of Deeds office which is responsible for vital records - the records are in a different office at the couthouse. In other counties where those records exist - if there are any others, it's difficult to know - the very old records remain scattered and nobody has ever made a point of finding them and creating an index. If you are looking for a specific early marriage whose date might be a little before those in the first book of marriage records in the county, it would be worth looking for other sorts of early records preceding the first marriage book that might possibly include a few very early marriage documents, either as "miscellaneous records" or old deed books or early probate records.

The events are rarely indexed in alphabetical order

County indexes typically have index entries sorted first by the first initial of the last name, but within all the entries for people whose last names began with 'H', for example, the entries are ordered by the date of the event. Thus instead of looking for "Hansen" and finding all the Hansen entries, you look for 'H' and start scanning names, picking out the entries that say "Hansen." If you know about when the event occurred you don't have to look at very many names, but if you can only narrow it down to some 40-year period, you will probably have to look at a lot of 'H's! Needless to say, a strict alphabetical index is far more convenient and less time-consuming by a mile. There are a number of counties for which alphabetical indexes exist . If there isn't an alphabetical index in your county, volunteer to create one and help everybody out! Until one is created, you'll just have to slog through a lot of names to find the one(s) you want. Not fun, but necessary.

You may not be able to view a record with confidential information, even in the index

Even though vital records are mostly public documents, there are exceptions. First of all, in most states, including Michigan and Minnesota, birth records that are less than 100 years old are confidential. It's not allowed to look at an index that merely refers to those confidential records. Moreover, even in Wisconsin, records of illegitimate births are completely off-limits. Those records are sequestered into special books and the public is not allowed to view them. Even the index entries to those records are supposed to have been deleted from the index volumes. (At one time those records were allowed to be viewed, but no longer.) Also, records of stillborn children are confidential, and the corresponding index entries may have been deleted.

Some counties don't allow enough time in one day for extensive searches

If you are only looking for a few specific records you should always have time to complete your search in the hours that are open to you at a vital records office, but if you are, for example, looking for all the records for a given surname, there are some counties where there just isn't enough time in one day. If the surname is somewhat common, it's easy to understand how you could run out of hours in a day in a county that has a large population with many people of that surname. That's just life. But it is quite frustrating indeed when you have to return on a second weekday to finish up because the vital records office has significantly shortened the number of hours allowed genealogists for searching to well below the typical 6 or 8 hours of access to the records. There are three counties with especially short hours where you are likely to experience this frustration:

Chippewa Co., Michigan
Milwaukee Co., Wisconsin
Portage Co., Wisconsin

At this time, Chippewa County and Milwaukee County both allow a genealogist only four hours per day. Portage County allows only four-and-a-half hours. It's no use trying to finagle more time at any of these places, because they're very strict. The Milwaukee office really has no choice - they have limited space and too many people who want to come in so they have people come in shifts. The other two counties have limited access time for other reasons, though. If you need more time than is allowed in a day in Chippewa County or Portage County, it's worth writing a polite letter to the County Clerk (Chippewa Co.) or the Register of Deeds (Portage Co.) requesting a change in their hours and explaining why. If enough people write, they may make the change, who knows? But otherwise, the only thing you can do is say, again, "That's life."

Some counties don't provide enough time for looking at records with confidential information

Records from certain time periods included some information that was later designated by law to be confidential. Each individual county was allowed to decide for themselves how to address the situation, but they are required to allow the public to view the portion of the information that was not confidential and not the portion that is confidential. Many counties opt to have one of the clerks show you the records, and the clerk will wait there while you view those records, placing a piece of paper over the parts of the record you are not allowed to view. If this is the solution the county chose, it takes their personnel a lot of time to show you the records. Though the counties are required to give you access to the non-confidential records, they are not required to provide you that access during the entire time the office is open. The hours during which staff is available to assist with viewing records with confidential data may be restricted, or the total amount of time you are allowed to spend with a person showing a record may be restricted regardless of the timeframe, or you may simply be told no personnel are available at that time and you'll have to look at the record on a different day. In one case the author unwittingly showed up at a courthouse outside the timeframe permitted for showing records with confidential information and the Registrar of Deeds kindly gave special permission for a clerk to help by showing the records, but usually offices are very strict about all their rules pertaining to genealogical research.

Despite certain restrictions, great compliment should be given to the personnel who assume the task of showing records with confidential information. Almost without exception the clerks help at a moment's notice, stopping whatever they are doing instantly with good cheer in the most helpful way possible. They always insist rules be followed, but they do their best to be helpful within the rules.

It's good to know ahead of time when there are restrictions on when records with confidential information may be viewed. You can click here to see a list of counties with mention of any limitations on viewing records with confidential information.

In the immediately preceding paragraphs, we're distinguishing between "confidential records," which may never be viewed at all, and "records with confidential information," which may be viewed in part. The preceding paragraphs apply only to the latter.

Two counties place special restrictions on when any records may be viewed, or some records that don't contain confidential information:

See the comments on individual counties for details.

The name you're looking for may have been seriously misspelled in the index and/or record

The names that are written into the index are copied from the original record, or else copied from a registration book that contained names copied from the original record. They may even have been copied from another older index book which contained names copied from the original record or a registration book. The name on the record the index directs you to, if it is from before 1906 (Wisconsin) or 1900 (Michigan), was probably copied from a certificate, which is a separate piece of paper. The person writing the name on the original certificate or record may not have inquired how the person spelled their name, especially in days long past where many people didn't read or write (or spell), in which case it's spelled the way he thought it would be spelled. The people whose information got copied into the index or the original record may not have written as clearly as others would write, and so the person copying may incorrectly interpret the letters that are written. These things give ample opportunity for a name to be spelled incorrectly in the index. If the index has been fully alphabetized, and especially if it has been computerized, you may completely miss seeing names that have been misspelled unless you make a concerted effort to find them. If it's only alphabetized by the first letter of the surname, you'll have to consider other names that look like variants on the spelling you're expecting as you scan for the name you are looking for.

The handwriting in the index may be very hard to read

Some indexes are typed, but most are handwritten. On the whole, writing in the indexes is remarkably clear and consistent, nothing like the handwriting you struggle with when viewing some population schedules from a census, but there are exceptions. When the writing is very old it may be in a more decorative script , with the letters formed in ways we don't form them today. Or the person writing may not make much difference between certain letters, such as between cursive 'L' and 'S', or between 'u' and 'n'. If you've looked at a lot of writing in indexes, these things are much less of a problem. Alternatively, you can look here for many good examples of the Spencerian Method of writing to see how letters are formed, and then when you see the writing you'll have learned how to read it. These examples use the same method as did most of the people writing the old entries in the index books.

It's one thing when the letters are formed using a method you aren't familiar with but can learn to recognize. It's another when the handwriting was simply poor. There seems to have been a lot of attention paid to the quality and clarity of the handwriting in index books across all decades in all counties, because the people doing the writing were the same people charged with having to use the indexes to find records without fail. Nevertheless, there is unavoidable variability in people's abilities to write clearly. When you just can't be sure of the writing in an index entry, the best thing to do is to consult the original record to which the index will lead you. Perhaps the writing will be clearer there.

Keep in mind that, although the index may be typed or written very clearly by hand, the name may have been misspelled when it was copied to the index because of trying to read difficult writing on an original document. The people creating indexes were always instructed not to change spellings from the original documents, but if they couldn't read what they saw, they'd naturally have to take a guess. If you can't find an entry in an index that should be there and you know the letters that are frequently formed similarly, you may have a clue for other spellings you should look for.

The handwriting in the record may be very hard to read

If the handwriting in the index is ambiguous you can always check the original record, but if it is ambiguous or illegible in the record book, there is usually no other place to check. However, if the record is from before 1906 (Wisconsin) or 1900 (Michigan), the county will usually have kept the original certificates from which the records you view were copied. It's sometimes possible to view the original certificate to clarify writing, when the clerks have ready access to them. (If it's an extremely old marriage certificate entirely handwritten in prose, there will be no other document; you're looking at the original or a facsimile of it.) When you can do this, consider yourself lucky. Clerks will usually tell you that these original certificates contain the same information as what you see in the register books (this is what the older books of records are called), but they will get the certificates nevertheless; just explain why you want to see it. In Saint Croix County, Wisconsin, you are allowed to get the old certificates yourself so access is unrestricted. In all other counties where the old certificates may be viewed, clerks must get them for you.

Look here for examples of the Spencerian Method of handwriting. This was the style of handwriting used in many old records, and if you are familiar with how the letters were formed it will be easier for you to read what you find there.

Information that should have been in the record may have been omitted

Death records are always supposed to name the parents of a person and other particulars about their life, but after the person is dead, they can hardly personally deliver that or any other information which might have only been in their head. It is common for fields on a death record to be blank because the informant supplying the personal information on the deceased doesn't know all the facts. Early records of all types often contain fields for information which has not been filled in for reasons no longer knowable. When you are looking at registrations instead of original certificates or copies thereof you can check to see if the information is on the certificate and just didn't get copied to the registration book - assuming the certificates are available for inspection - and once in a great while you will find that missing piece of information. However, in the vast majority of cases the information is missing on the certificate as well. The clerks were to faithfully transfer all the information from the certificates to the registration books.

The first name of the child may not have been given in their birth record

The information for birth certificates is collected almost immediately following birth, and sometimes the name of the child has not yet been decided upon. In modern times the parents are absolutely required to supply the name of the newborn as soon as it has been decided, but long ago the parents were simply given a piece of paper to send in later, and sometimes they lost it or never bothered to send it in, and there was no follow-up from the county. Those children are recorded in the index and record only with the last name, and you can't get the first name from the county records at all. (A census record may show the child's name.)

If only the last name is recorded, it may also indicate the child died soon after birth. If the infant died almost immediately, there may be only the birth record with no first name and no death record. One cannot assume no first name means the child died, though.

Sometimes the first name is not recorded in the index, but if you look at the record it has been written in. This would indicate the record was amended after the index was created. Normally both the index and record are updated when a first name is added, but not always.

The maiden name of the mother may not be given

Sometimes the maiden name of a mother is not given, whether the mother of a newborn, of a bride or groom, or of a deceased person. Even though the maiden name will be requested on the record, the recorder may have written only the first and married names of a woman. It seems to have depended to a degree on the mindset of the person collecting the information. Just be glad when a maiden name is given. After the state vital records system was created the maiden name was nearly always properly recorded. You can look here for a discussion of how to find a maiden name in vital records.

A placename may be ambiguous

One problematic type of field in all vital record types is the name of a place. Many towns (townships) contain a city or village of the same name as the town. For decades, the states have asked the person filling out a record to indicate which is meant by the placename that is recorded, whether it's a city, village, or town (township), and that resolves any ambiguity. Unfortunately that designation doesn't apply to all placename fields even on the records that include it, and in old records people would simply write down a placename and it's hard to tell which civil division was meant.

If a street address is included then the rest of the placename is probably a city or village name rather than a township name, but long ago street addresses often weren't indicated even in cities, and if there is no street address you can't assume that means it's not the city.

Similarly, sometimes there is a city or town named identically to a county in the same state. If the record says "Such-and-such Co." you know the county is meant, but if it says, for example, "La Crosse, WI", and the label for the field is just "birthplace" instead of "county of birth," you can't automatically assume the City of La Crosse is meant instead of La Crosse County. If it's a marriage record, see if the fiancee provided a placename in a parallel field, and see if that placename is definitely a city or definitely a county. Usually the records give parallel information on a marriage record with the same degree of specificity, so if one is a county, the other one probably is, too. Otherwise, if the city or town is in the same county in which the record was created, the name more than likely refers to the city or town rather than to a different county of the same name. If neither of those applies, though, you really don't have anything to go on from the record alone; you can only make supposition based on what seems likely.

The bottom line is, you will have to verify your guess elsewhere when there is any ambiguity in a placename in order to be completely sure you are resolving the placename correctly.

Another problem with placenames is that sometimes villages are named that no longer exist, so you have a hard time finding out what county it is in to go hunt for other information. Many Web sites list the names of old villages that no longer exist for various geographical areas, but sometimes you really have to dig or ask for help. If you can guess at the county, a call to the county office that handles land records may be helpful, as people who work with those records often have run across the old placenames and may recognize it. But check other resources first - those people are pretty busy and depending on who you get may not actually have any helpful information. (Just because they haven't heard of it doesn't mean it didn't exist in their county anyway.) Old atlases that include county maps are a good source to help identify old placenames, as well. Again, there is probably a relevant map for you somewhere in the Internet. Those maps aren't always golden information, either, though. If it's not on a map, that's only an indication that the place isn't in that county.

Of course, placenames are often misspelled, and if you haven't heard of it yourself you can have a devil of a time figuring out just where it is, especially if the state isn't named, which happens sometimes. If the state isn't named, first try the state of the record, then try all the bordering states, and if it's not anywhere there - good luck! If you look long enough and hard enough you'll probably find it, but if the state wasn't named you'll definitely have to verify it with additional information if you want to be sure you got the right place.

Information on different vital records may conflict

When people had to give information on their own birthplace or their parents' birthplaces, they were often uncertain of the location, and so one indication may be given one time, and a different one another. Usually records are consistent, but especially with birthplaces of parents, there may be variation. For example, you may see a person give their birthplace as New York in a couple of their children's birth records, but in their death record the surviving spouse may give the deceased's birthplace as Vermont. In cases like this, you just can't be sure of the truth without locating the actual birth record of the individual in one location or the other, which, of course, may not be easy!

Information on vital records may be incorrect

If there is a conflict between vital records, obviously one is right and one is wrong. If you don't have the conflicting record to look at, you don't even know there is a problem. If a name is misspelled, you don't know how it was originally spelled except by preponderance of evidence in other records which you may not have.

The high quality of vital records pertains especially to dates and places of the events they record in a timely fashion and the names of the people directly involved. Whenever people are supplying information about themselves which was not directly observable by the person creating the original record, there is always a chance for the people to be mistaken or to carelessly supply inadvertently misleading information. You can pretty much take a marriage date on a marriage record as correct, for example, but the names of the bride's or groom's parents may not be correct. You would normally assume a person would know their parent's names, but if the parent died in their childhood and the other parent had passed away since or was not in attendance at the wedding, a situation not uncommon in days past, a parent's name given on the marriage certificate could easily be incorrect. This is why it is always best to verify any information through a second, independent source. Even that does not prove a fact, but it greatly reduces likelihood of error.

The age of computers does not hold sway in the world of vital records

The tasks you perform in a courthouse are always made easier when everything has been computerized, and one would think everything would be computerized in the age of computers since it obviously saves everyone a lot of time including the office personnel. However, the up-front cost of computerizing even only the indexes is really tremendous because of the wages that must be paid to people as they laboriously type and double-check for correctness tens of thousands of names and numbers from the old indexes. Even though everyone knows a computerized index is best, most counties just don't have the funds to computerize the records. Many counties have, in fact, adopted computer methods for recording new records, but the old record information has not been entered into the computers because of the mass of data that already existed at the time computers first came on the scene. If you live in a county where indexes are not computerized and available to the public, volunteer to work on data entry and to get additional volunteer help if the county will invest in a system! If they can't invest in a system, you or others can enter the index information into a spreadsheet on your own computer and provide a printed alphabetical index that will be immensely helpful to everyone. Work with the county records office to do this, and if they have questions give them the names of other counties that already have at least partially computerized indexes or scanned records on computer that anyone can use:

Doubtless all county offices would love to have computerized or alphabetical printed indexes! But of course genealogists are a big beneficiary.

To make an estimate of how big a job it would be to type up alphabetical indexes, assume it would take about 1.5 hours per index page and multiply by the number of pages in the existing index. The computer will do the sorting for you automatically - all you have to worry about is the typing. The biggest issue in creating a new typed index is double-checking to make sure you haven't accidentally mis-typed the volume or page - doing so creates a big problem. The next biggest is making sure you have read the index entry correctly. When counties create new indexes themselves, they often go back through the original record books and re-enter the data directly from them just so as to not introduce an extra set of copying errors, one set in the copy from the old records to the old index, one set from the old index to the new index.

Note that the most beneficial thing is to have a fully alphabetical index, whether it's accessed on a computer or not. Fully alphabetical indexes may be even more helpful on paper than on the computer because computers aren't good with variant spellings and misspellings of names, so it's good to have a document you can scan with your eyes. However, the easiest way by far to create a fully alphabetized index is to enter all the names into the computer and let the computer do the sorting. From there the full index can be printed in alphabetical order if desired. Most counties have such alphabetical indexes for the 1990s and later, but alphabetical indexes, whether accessed on computer or from paper, are the exception rather than the rule for dates before that.

The Bottom Line

With all the potential problems, you simply can't be sure one will find the information you expect to find at a courthouse. Nevertheless, if the date of the record is after 1906 (Wisconsin) or 1900 (Michigan) it will probably be there, and even before that there is a good chance of finding great information. One amazing thing is how fine a job the counties have done preserving and organizing all the information, year after year. The easiest place for the system to fail is for a record to be misindexed. After having looked up over three thousand records spread among all counties in Wisconsin and upper Michigan, the author has only encountered about four cases of misindexing, and in all but one case the record was readily located by assuming the page was off by 100 or that it was within a few pages either way. Kudos to the courthouse clerks and their supervisors! If they ever seem to be too rigid regarding rules of access to records, remember that it's that very rigidity regarding rules that has allowed the records to remain well-organized for over a century and accessible today and into the future. The people who work in the courthouses know what has to be done, and they do it.


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