My mother was the oldest of three and the only one born in a hospital. She was born in 1910 but apparently it was not recorded. She had to get a delayed birth certificate in 1975 in order for my father to fill out his forms for railroad retirement. So even the hospitals were lax. Pat Ingersoll ===================== From: organizr01@aol.com Date: 2007/02/04 Sun PM 10:57:16 CST To: philly-roots@rootsweb.com Subject: [Phly-Rts] Reporting births and deaths Actually, the laws in Philly required that births and deaths be reported prior to 1860, but it wasn't until 1860 that attempts to enforce these laws became more serious. Even after that date, many clergymen ignored the laws, which is why you will find life cycle events in religious records, but not in civil records, and often not even in religious records. Births and deaths that took place at home without the intervention of physicians were also frequently not reported. My grandmother had six children and the first four were not reported. The fifth was born in 1917, the first of the children to be born in a hospital. One relative reported to me that his birth was not reported by the delivering physician because he was not expected to live, yet his twin's birth was reported. (The truth is stranger than fiction.) I searched birth records for my grandmother and her seven siblings in NYC at the turn of the century and didn't find a single one. The clerk explained that births by midwives were not required to be reported because the expectation was that so many poor children would die. Merle -----Original Message----- From: phillysleuth@verizon.net To: philly-roots@rootsweb.com Sent: Sun, 4 Feb 2007 8:11 PM Subject: [Phly-Rts] Mt Moriah Records at Hsp and searching for other cemetery burials HSP has a very complete collection of Mt Moriah burials which is reasonably easy to search (by year and first letter of surname, I believe). Of course its not possible to extract everyone with a particular surname as easily as it would be if it were in a database, but it isn't hard scanning, even from the microfilm. Reburials are a problem, however. I don't know if many cemeteries captured reburials in detail, but Mt Moriah doesn't seem to have or at least not easily interpreted and detected. Most of the other lists on the internet, and the GSP database, are incomplete, thru no fault of the creator, just because of the volume of data and the resulting problems with data entry. I could never get a straight answer from GSP as to what years or alphabetic ranges their db included and in fact was stalled by one of the administrative staff when I asked to talk to the person in charge of the project to get details. The only avenue Icould pursue, I was told, was to come in a search for whoever I wanted. What I wanted was something I could post which defined their database contents and limitations so that you could know what a no-find on their db meant. If you know the approximate time period when your ancestor should have been buried at M.M, it shouldn't be difficult to find them on the films (which I believe are also available thru the LDS, but someone should check that). Another idea, for those who have access to the City Archives, are cemetery returns. Normally, what I always thought of as "the cemetery return list" was the 1803-1860 list by year and surname that lists a brief summary of the deceased, cause of death, age and where they were buried, all if known. This past year I found that the City Archives has cemetery returns in a broader sense going back much further then 1860, when the recording of civil records was started. I don't know the exact starting date, but it's quite early. Basically, it's the same format as later cemetery returns... a summary of who died within the reporting period of the cemetery, and then something close to a death certificate for each person. Some of the filmed documents aren;t in the greatest shape, but many are. When I've had hints that people I was looking for were buried in a particular cemetery within a reasonable time frame, I went directly to the cemetery return for that period and have located many people's death cert, even prior to 1860, thru this mechanism, without bothering with the index or the death register. I've also picked up variations in spelling that initially thru me off the trail when looking at the index, which were resolved by looking at the cemetery return and its d.certs. For instance, one child was LEIGH in the index, LEES on the cemetery's summary return, and back to LEIGH in the death cert. Obviously the same person didn't fill all the documents in. LEES was the correct name, but if I had depended on the index and was not particularly with it that day, I might have bypassed LEIGH altogether and not found the record. You can go thru quite a few returns for a particular cemetery in a reasonably short time. They reported, in general, monthly or quarterly (as usual I forget). Sometimes they are out of order and sometimes they are for longer periods, but its definitely worth looking at them directly, especially if you can't find a particular person in the index but you know the approximate date, or when you want to look at burials before 1860. Maybe everyone else is aware of this extension on "the cemetery returns" collection, and I'm just late to the parade, but it was a really great discovery. I don't know if this collection is available thru the LDS. jo -- Internal Virus Database is out-of-date. Checked by AVG Free Edition. 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