Wow! Isn't that wonderful. A dream come true for genealogists. Can you imagine being able to research and get copies of birth, marriage, and death records online?! I only wish I had ancestors from Chicago. :-) Carol ----- Original Message ----- From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, September 08, 2007 12:19 PM Subject: Re: [NJ] NJ Vital records Wonder if New Jersey is going to get into the 21st Century. Sry, just a joke. >From the Chicago Tribune Old county records being put online By Jason Meisner | Tribune staff reporter 9:56 PM CDT, September 6, 2007 Professional genealogists and people interested in researching their family tree will soon be able to access key records from home instead of ordering by mail or traipsing down to a musty office in the Loop, Cook County Clerk David Orr said Thursday. If all goes as planned, newly digitized versions of county records such as birth and death certificates and marriage licenses will be available beginning in January on one searchable Web site that will revolutionize how such research is done, Orr said. "It's going to be a big boon for us and for the genealogy folks who have to go through us to get the records," Orr said. "It will allow them to go online to see if the records exist, to find relatives and purchase copies online." The Web site is part of a massive yearlong effort to digitize the county's 24 million vital records, which date to 1871, when record-keeping began after the Chicago Fire wiped out previous stockpiles, clerk's office spokeswoman Kelley Quinn said. The records have stacked up for decades in the basement area of the county's administration building at Clark and Randolph Streets, where conditions have not been ideal. "We've had rats, floods, fires, bugs, you name it," Orr said. Over the years, the county has made special efforts to save some records, including employing a special "freeze-drying" process to restore documents that had water damage, he said. Scanning and indexing each record was completed in June, and the county is uploading about 1 million files per week into a computer server, a process that is expected to be complete by the end of the year, Quinn said. "Everything will be updated and fully digitized at that point," Quinn said. Once the digitizing process is complete, Cook County will be one of the first counties in the U.S. to have all such materials stored electronically, she said. The genealogy Web site will offer a tutorial for people interested in researching family trees and allow users to search for relatives by name. Once the proper person is found, users can pay a fee to download records and print them at home. Documents available online will be birth certificates that are at least 75 years old, marriage certificates more than 50 years old, and death certificates more than 20 years old, Quinn said. She said that certified copies, which are required to obtain official documents such as a driver's license, will not be available online. No Social Security numbers will be available on the online documents, she said. ************************************** ************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message __________ NOD32 2514 (20070908) Information __________ This message was checked by NOD32 antivirus system. http://www.eset.com