Are there any major online indexes of Philadelpha births between 1887-1897, marriages 1888-1892, 1920-1930, deaths 1910-1940? I know there are LDS films for some of that, but it would require hunting through dozens of films just for the three births that we need because of the way they have set the records up. I have hunted the user contributed databases at rootsweb, with no luck there. Also, where would I order an 1890 Philadelphia birth certificate? I could not figure out where to get from the government. Marriages and births were Jewish, so church records are not available. I am trying to do as much research on my own before asking for help finding specific people's records, which is why I am not posting details at this point. This is my cousin's family and definitely -not- our Cohens that were in Philadelphia. Thanks

Oh, I should mention we have most of the census records, I just really need to locate deaths and get various BMD certificates to round out and help answer a bunch of puzzles.

In 1996 I went to Philly (the city of my birth and where all of my mother's family settled when they came the the USA). For one whole week, my sister and traipsed through cemeteries (none of them had put their records onto computer at that time), visited Jewish funeral homes (they were just beginning to go to computerized records - Levine & Sons being the first), the NASA office in Center City Philly, and finally the Philadelphia Archives. We spent two whole days in the Archives, looking for birth records of my mgm and death records of my mggf. They're in large, old ledger books. The entries in those ledgers (as were the cemetery records) were entered chronologically. So you can imagine how long it takes to go through these large books a line at a time. AND, if you're looking for a name like KRAMER, COHEN, LEVINE (all very common), you can go a little nuts. In the case of my mgm, we finally found her as "COHEN, baby" - but we didn't know it actually was her until we found (through the help of Levine & Sons) the burial site of my mggf. HIS tombstone had one set of information in English, and another in Hebrew. It wasn't until we finally got the Hebrew properly translated that we learned which "COHEN, baby" entry was my mgm. Turned out that she was 4 years older (actually born in April 1896) than she told us (including on her marriage license), and her father died (actually died 1/1897) when she was only 9 months old. Things are better doing research in Philly now, so I am told. It just takes a LOT of patience and fortitude. Good luck, (Mrs.) Ricki Randall Zunk On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 11:45 AM, the cohens < [email protected]> wrote: > Are there any major online indexes of Philadelpha births between > 1887-1897, marriages 1888-1892, 1920-1930, deaths 1910-1940? I know > there are LDS films for some of that, but it would require hunting > through dozens of films just for the three births that we need because > of the way they have set the records up. > > I have hunted the user contributed databases at rootsweb, with no luck > there. > > Also, where would I order an 1890 Philadelphia birth certificate? I > could not figure out where to get from the government. > > Marriages and births were Jewish, so church records are not available. > > I am trying to do as much research on my own before asking for help > finding specific people's records, which is why I am not posting > details at this point. This is my cousin's family and definitely > -not- our Cohens that were in Philadelphia. > > Thanks > > > ********* > Visit the threaded archives of this list: > http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index/PHILLY-ROOTS > ********* > > ------------------------------- > 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 >