Recently I was asked by an out-of-state client to obtain her father's death certificate. Leo Wallick died in either Pierce or King county, about 1960. I narrowed down the date by finding his death notice in the Seattle Daily Times, on 11 March 1961.
I immediately searched for his name on the Washington Digital Archives, and was very puzzled when my search for Leo Wallick's death yielded no results.
I did another search, using the last name only, and got a short list:
What do you do when an online database doesn't contain the record you were expecting to find?
Check to see what records are included.
Check to see what records are included.
I noticed something odd in this short list of records. Do you see it? The death index from the Department of Health includes the years 1907 to 1960 and 1965 to 2017. The years 1961 to 1964 are on microfilm only. Which means I had to fill out the request form and mail it in order to receive the death certificate.
I had another good example just yesterday. I was searching for a marriage record between Perry Baldwin and Virginia Arend, and had found both an engagement notice and a marriage license application in the Cincinnati Enquirer from November 1938.
"Interesting Engagement," Cincinnati (OH) Enquirer, 13 February 1938, p.94, col. 3. It was an "interesting engagement" because Virginia was marrying an older widower with five children.
"Marriage Licenses," Cincinnati (OH) Enquirer, 18 November 1938, p.21, col. 4. It should be noted that just because a marriage license was obtained does not mean the marriage took place on that day, that month, that location, or at all.
My first thought in looking for a marriage record was FamilySearch, which has (currently) 46 collections of Ohio records. I decided to try "Ohio County Marriages, 1789-2013. I filled in the search box, and searched with the two surnames Baldwin and Arend (and then each one separately), and widened the date range to 1938-1940. No results.
What do you do when an online database doesn't contain the record you were expecting to find?
Check to see what records are included.
Check to see what records are included.
In this case, I clicked on "Browse through 1,547,844 images" at the very bottom of the page. I was presented with a list of counties, and I clicked on "Hamilton". And there I found my answer: the Hamilton county marriage records in this collection stopped at 1931.
Genealogists are persistent by nature, and I wasn't about to give up. I did find the marriage record I was looking for, online, although it wasn't on Ancestry or FamilySearch.
Where did I find it? Well, that's the subject for another blog post!
Where did I find it? Well, that's the subject for another blog post!
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