Vital records should contain basic information that will help you to fill out the dates and locations on your family tree. In other instances, vital records can provide additional details that can further your research, spark new questions, or even add new details to a person's history. Vital records include birth records, marriage licenses, separation agreements, divorce certificates, and death certificates. You can easily remember vital records by thinking of “birth, marriage, and death,” and the records that are created around these events.
Let’s take a look at some of the logistics of vital records and see what else we can learn.
Vital records are usually created and kept by local governments (states, counties, etc.), and a birth record from one state can have completely different information and formatting than one birth record from another state. Not only did states record different information, but every state in the United States began keeping vital records in different years! Here are some examples:
In Indiana statewide registration of births was required in 1907 but general compliance was not obtained until 1920.
Marriages were typically recorded from the formation of the county in which they were performed. Statewide registration for marriages was required much earlier, in 1800.
Statewide registration of deaths was required in 1900, but general compliance was not reached until 1920.
Like the first example above, many counties and towns were keeping their own vital records before a national standard of registration began in 1920. For example, the birth register that we show below is from 1897 in Nashville, Tennessee. Statewide registration of births in Tennessee was not required until 1914, 17 years after that birth was recorded! So you should also be checking for vital record collections at the county and town levels if they weren’t being kept at the state level. There will be many times and places where some (if not all) vital records are not available, so stay tuned for our upcoming post about substitutes for vital records!
We recommend checking the FamilySearch Wiki for the state in which you are researching to check what years different vital records begin. You can scroll down on the page linked and see a list of all 50 US States. Click on the state to learn more about what vital records are available for that locality. The FamilySearch Wiki is an amazing resource! You will want to reference it often because it will contain invaluable information about cities and countries from around the world.
Some early vital records were kept in registers. Each line in a registry book would record the vital event of an individual. This example is from a birth register kept in Nashville, Tennessee. It’s interesting to note that this register does not include the given names of the babies (most registers do, but each register includes different information). With the information provided about the parents, however, you could search for this family in the 1900 census and likely find out the given name of baby girl Bell if there is a little girl aged 2-4 living in the Bell household.
If you want to practice your paleography, transcription, and citation skills then pause here. Get out a piece of paper and write out the details of this document. You can view the full record here (you will need to sign in to an Ancestry.com account to view it). When you are finished with your transcription and or citation, scroll to the bottom of our post to view ours (and click here to read our blog about citations and how to create them).
Hopefully, this post gave you some insight as to what a vital record is and why we want to find vital records for our ancestors. Vital records can provide the dates and locations of major life events! Sometimes they will name important family members (parents, witnesses, children, etc.). With the knowledge that most US vital records are kept from the 1920s onward, you should be able to concentrate your search of vital records on the family members and ancestors who had vital records made during the time and place in which they lived their life.
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Transcription:
Date of record: 29 Aug 1897
Date of birth: 29 Aug 1897
Name: Bell
Sex: F
Color: W
Place of Birth: No. 73 Street Washington Ward 15
Full name of father: J. H. Bell
Full name of mother: Laura M Bell
Residence of Parents: No. 73 Street Washington Ward 15
Nativity of Parents: father Ten[nessee] mother Ten[nessee]
Occupation of father: salesman
By whom reported: J B Nowlin
Citation:
City of Nashville,“Tennessee, U.S., City Birth Records, 1881-1915,”no. 766, birth of [girl] Bell, 29 Aug 1897,Nashville, Davidson, Tennessee;database with images, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com : accessed 11 Aug 2022).
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