For those of you who don't get Eastman's Genealogy Newsletter, I thought you'd be interested in this: ========================================================== 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. ========================================================== - 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 ============================================================= Subscription information: There are two different methods to subscribe to this free newsletter: Method #1: to subscribe, to cancel an existing subscription, modify an existing subscription in any way or to read back issues, go to: http://www.rootsforum.com/newsletter.htm Method #2: Send an e-mail to rootscomputing- subscribe@listbot.com Please feel free to copy this subscription information and pass it on to anyone else who you think might be interested in obtaining a free subscription.