New Research Tools

The Friends of the Fiske Genealogical Foundation recently presented the Fiske Library with two important genealogical aids:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, FamilySearch™, 1880 United States Census and National Index. This set of compact discs contains the complete 1880 United States Census plus a National Index.  Census information is shown by household or institution for approximately 50 million individuals.  Thanks to Eldon Davis for earmarking a portion of his contribution to the Friends for acquisition of the 1880 census CDs.

Full membership at Ancestry.com.  This membership allows researchers using the PCs located at the Fiske Library to access records, various genealogical databases, books, and census records available at Ancestry.com. Thanks to Mary Peters for negotiating this membership on behalf of the library.

Minnesota Death Certificate Index

The Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, in collaboration with the Minnesota Department of Health, is hosting an on-line, searchable index of death certificates issued in that state between 1908 and 1946.

The Historical Society will make uncertified copies and mail them to you for $8 per record. You can download the order form to mail to the Society with your remittance. It takes two to three weeks for receipt of the certificate.

The search engine is found at http://people.mnhs.org/dci/Search.cfm and is easy to use.

There is a Frequently Asked Questions page with a great deal of information about the service. The index provides the first, middle and last name of a deceased person, the date of death, the county of death and the certificate number. That information is sufficient to locate the copy of the individual death certificate.

At the Society headquarters in St. Paul, visitors may do their own retrieval of the death certificates from the microfilm and make inexpensive photocopies for their own use.

The Library at the Society headquarters also loans the relevant microfilm rolls to cooperating interlibrary loan libraries for a small fee.

Gary A. Zimmerman

But now “it” is all done......What is “it” you ask? A new research tool you can use the next time you visit the Library.

Some time ago Mary Peters was given a number of issues of the Hartford Times genealogy column.

This was a weekly column of genealogical queries and answers, which did not include anything later than 1850. Typically, the queries included a lot of information about the people and, of course, the answers which were printed contained references as to where the information was obtained. So, these were a valuable resource before computers...and still are!

The columns were put into 5 large scrapbooks and made available at the library as another repository of genealogical information. However, they were too difficult and time-consuming to use as they were. So, a project was undertaken to index the columns—that’s what took all summer!

There are some things you should know, however. There was no “spell-check” at the newspaper at that time, and there were many typographical errors, as well as many ways to spell the same name.

The indexes are for periods of six months each, so you will need to check each index in the same book which contains the original columns. If there are two or more entries for the same surname on the same page, it will be indicated. If the family names are repeated with different dates, it is probably the original query with the following date and answer (you hope!)

You may also get a chuckle about an occasional $5 “reward” for information about an ancestor. Maybe that is all it was worth, but then, again, maybe that indicates inflation???

Mary Stevenson

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