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Subject: Indiana Vital Records on CD-ROM
Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 09:25:58 EDT

For those of you who don't get Eastman's Genealogy Newsletter, I thought
you'd be interested in this:

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The following article is from Eastman's Online Genealogy
Newsletter and is copyright 2001 by Richard W. Eastman. It is
re-published here with the permission of the author.
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- Indiana Vital Records on CD-ROM

Heritage Quest has released three new CD-ROM disks of interest to
anyone researching Indiana genealogy. These three are:

* Indiana Vital Records Birth Index, 1850-1920
* Indiana Vital Records Marriage Index, 1850-1920
* Indiana Vital Records Death Index, 1800-1941

I had a chance to use all three products this week.

The information on these CD-ROM disks is an electronic copy of the
Indiana Works Progress Administration (WPA) Vital Record Indexes.
Heritage Quest provided the following description:

Indiana Works Progress Administration (WPA) Vital Record
Indexes

During the period 1936-1940, the Works Progress Administration
(WPA) indexed a large part of the birth, marriage, and death
records of 68 of Indiana's 92 counties.

Marriages have been recorded in Indiana from the territorial
period until the present day by the Clerk of the Circuit Court
in the county where the marriage was performed. Births and
deaths have been recorded by the civil authorities in Indiana
counties beginning in 1882. Records of births and deaths are
maintained by the County Health Officer of the county where
the birth or death occurred.

Photocopies of marriage records are available from the Clerk
of the Circuit Court in the courthouse of the county.
Information from birth and death certificates may be obtained
by writing the County Health Officer of the appropriate
county. Contact the Indiana State Board of Health for the
current address. The book and page references refer to the
book and page where the record is recorded. In writing for
records, be sure to include the book and pages numbers with
your request.

The fiche number refers to the fiche set at Heritage Quest.
The fiche, which is a filming of the copies of the original
indexes, can be purchased from Heritage Quest. A free CD-ROM
of the Heritage Quest catalog is available on request.

There are frequent errors in these records due to mistakes
made when the information was first recorded and also due to
mistakes made when the indexes were originally prepared.
Keying the data has undoubtedly added more errors. In keying
this material, no effort was taken to try to correct errors
which may have appeared on the actual record or on the WPA
Index.

The following counties do not have WPA Indexes.
Blackford
Brown
Crawford
Dearborn
Decatur
Debois
Fayette
Grant
Jefferson
Jennings
Lawrence
Marshall
Noble
Ohio
Porter
Randolph
Ripley
Rush
Scott
Steuben
Switzerland
Tipton
Union
Wabash
Whitley

Pulaski County has no birth records, but does have marriage
and death records available. These have been included.

Due to the differences in the data from county to county we
have combined two events into one field. In some counties the
field was used to record the marriage license date and in
other counties the same field was used to record birth dates.
These two events will be shown in the same field and the user
is to determine by the date if it applies as a birth date or
as a license date.

Product Notes
All Indiana counties are included with the following
exceptions: Blackford, Brown, Crawford, Dearborn, Decatur,
Debois, Fayette, Grant, Jefferson, Jennings, Lawrence,
Marshall, Noble, Ohio, Porter, Pulaski, Randolph, Ripley,
Rush, Scott, Steuben, Switzerland, Tipton, Union, Wabash and
Whitley.

Since this title was indexed from compilations of the Indiana
Works Projects Administration, any errors contained in the
original compiled work are duplicated in the index. Publ.
2001.

The software used on these CD-ROM disks is the proprietary
Heritage Quest Archives Viewer for Windows, which seems easy to
use and very logical. All required software is included on the CD-
ROM disk; there is no requirement for any other software other
than the Windows operating system. Software installation required
less than one minute on my 600-megahertz Windows 2000 system.

I started with the Indiana Vital Records Birth Index CD-ROM, which
contains 1,530,485 birth records in 68 Indiana counties from 1850
to 1920. All 1.5 million records are contained on one CD-ROM disk.
The search page is a "fill in the blanks" form in which you enter
as much information as you know about the individual(s). The
software then searches the database to find all matches for the
criteria that you specified. You may enter any or all of the
following:

* Surname
* Child's name
* Father's given name
* Mother's given name
* Mother's maiden name
* Sex
* Color
* Birth month
* Birth day
* Birth year
* County
* Book
* Page
* Fiche

In the date fields, you can specify a range of dates, such as
"1875 to 1900." In the other fields you may specify wildcard
searches. A wildcard search is a text string with asterisks or
question marks used in place of letters. An asterisk can represent
one or more letters; a question mark is used in place of a single
letter. For example, suppose that you are looking for someone
named Anderson, but you are aware that there could be several
spellings of this name, such as Andersen, Anderssen, or Andersson.
To do a search that would find these other spellings, you could
use a search string like: And*s?n

You can also exclude certain data. Sometimes a search will find so
many records that you may wish to narrow it down a bit. For
example, suppose that you are looking for someone named Smith,
which is a common name. However, the Smith you are looking for was
thought to have been living in one of several possible locations.
Using the Exclude option, you can specify the localities you want
the program to ignore in its search.

As usual, I first did a search on my own surname, and the program
almost instantly found 56 birth records for children named
Eastman. The search speed was impressive; I filled in the Surname
blank, clicked on "Search," and all 56 names appeared within 3 or
4 seconds. Next, I did a similar search, only I specified to sort
the results by the mothers' maiden names. Again, within 3 or 4
seconds I was looking at all 56 names, but sorted differently. I
could easily pick out family groups, such as all those with the
mother's maiden name of Andrews, those with the mother's maiden
name of Armstrong, and so forth.

Unlike some of the competitors' CD-ROM products, I found it easy
to copy information to the Windows Clipboard so that I could later
paste the information into another Windows program, such as a word
processor. The "Copy-and-Paste" was limited to one record at a
time, however. For instance, here is a typical record that I
copied from the Indiana Vital Records Birth Index CD-ROM and
pasted into Word while writing this newsletter:

Surname: EASTMAN
Child Given Name: HILDA W
Father Given Name: CLAIR
Mother Given Name: VERA
Maiden Name: GARRETH
Sex: F
Color: W
Month: NOV
Day: 13
Year: 1913
County: STJOSEPH
Book: MCH-56
Page: 41
Fiche: 4194

The Indiana Vital Records Marriage Index, 1850-1920 CD-ROM
operates in a very similar fashion. This two-disk set contains a
fully searchable index to 3,042,781 entries for marriages from
1850 to 1920 in 68 Indiana counties. The primary difference is the
available fields that may be searched:

* Surname
* Given name
* Father's given name
* Spouse's given name
* Spouse's surname
* Sex
* Color
* Age
* Birth month
* Birth day
* Birth year
* Marriage month
* Marriage day
* Marriage year
* County
* Book
* Page
* Fiche

Here is a typical entry:

Surname: EASTMAN
Given Name: WILLIAM
Sex:
Color: B
Age: 0
Spouse: LYDIA A
Spouse Surname: WILLIAMS
Month: AUG
Day: 10
Year: 1919
Father:
Mother:
Maiden Name:
B/L Month: OCT
B/L Day: 11
B/L Year: 1895
County: CLARK
Book: 45
Page: 229
Fiche: 3857

The Indiana Vital Records Death Index, 1800-1941 CD-ROM contains
an index to 867,134 entries for deaths in 68 Indiana counties. All
of the death records fit onto a single CD-ROM disk. The searchable
data fields include:

* Surname
* Given name
* Sex
* Color
* Age
* Death month
* Death day
* Death year
* County
* Book
* Page
* Fiche

Here is a typical entry from the Death Records:

Surname: EASTMAN
Given Name: SARAH J
Sex: F
Color: W
Age: 82
Month: MAY
Day: 3
Year: 1918
County: DAVIESS
Locality: DAVIESS CO
Book: H-21
Page: 61
Fiche: 3882

As always, remember that these are indexes, not the original
records. The indexes contain data extracted from the original
records but may not include all the information available on the
original records. There also may be some transcription errors.
After finding a person listed in the indexes, you will want to
rent a copy of the microfiche or microfilm in order to view the
original record with all information.

The Indiana Vital Records on CD-ROM requires Windows 95, 98, Me,
NT or Windows 2000. These CD-ROM disks also require a 100-
megahertz or faster Pentium processor, at least 16 megabytes of
RAM memory, and 4-speed or faster CD-ROM drive.

Heritage Quest has a winner in these CD-ROM disks. They contain
high-quality genealogy information: extracted indexes of original
vital records. They are a bit expensive, however:

* Indiana Vital Records Birth Index, 1850-1920 - $39.95
* Indiana Vital Records Marriage Index, 1850-1920 - $69.95
* Indiana Vital Records Death Index, 1800-1941 - $29.95

The above prices do not include shipping or taxes. Members of the
Heritage Quest Research Club can deduct 10% from the above prices.

To obtain more information about the Heritage Quest Indiana Vital
Records on CD-ROM, or to order them online via the company's
secure Web order form, go to: http://www.heritagequest.com

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