Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Fond Du Lac County, Wisconsin, vitals index

The Fond Du Lac Public Library has turned a 64-year-old card index into an online Vital Statistics Index covering at least some marriages, obituaries, funeral notices, and "milestone anniversaries" in local newspapers from 1846 to 1994 and from 2005 to the present. As the site says without wasting words, "The newspaper index is incomplete. Various indexers worked at differing levels of thoroughness."

So the usual strictures about indexes apply: put the results in your database if you want, but if you want to know, email the library for a photocopy of the newspaper report (which itself is far from infallible).

H/t to the New England Historic Genealogical Society's eNews, edition of 11 June, to which you can subscribe for free; few recent issues are archived on line.

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