For the past several days, I have been working with the relatively new Pennsylvania Death Certificates, 1906-1963 collection. I had already done some research on them, but that was "way back when" you had to write, wait months, and cost money, OR drive to Harrisburg. I had already identified 21 people with Death Certificate Numbers.
The purpose of this blog post, is a summary of my experience with the NEW collection, on Ancestry, that end up in my Ancestry Member Tree as Shaky Leaf Hints. I then compared that with the hints in FTM2014, merged the records in FTM2014 and did all of the follow up work following the merge. That work includes getting the "Source Information" from Ancestry.com, into an Evidence Explained format for Citations, putting a Citation on Each Death Certificate, Entering a Research Log entry for each person that was cited from that record, and created a Death Certificate Fact for follow up later.
I only recorded the Facts from the Merge an will review each Death Certificate in the future. This was just go get the information from Ancestry into my FTM2014 file.
I started with 42 Hints in my Ancestry Member Tree. I was able to merge 32 of them. There are now 10 new items on my ToDo list, for follow up. 75% of the hints were accurate. Of the remaining 10, 7 were hints in the AMT that do not show up in FTM2014. I will be looking into this issue, as I have already reported this to Ancestry.com. There were 3 other hints that I have to look into further, as they weren't a quick fix, quick merge, not quite sure if they are the same people. Bottom line, the hints were good and worth while working with.
The good news, I added 10 more people that were not in my database. Parents of people who I had in my database, not to mention a score of maiden names for people, females in my file. All good. Picked up a couple of middle names along the way.
There is some amazing information in these Death Certificates as I glanced at them along the way, but didn't want to get side tracked in the detail. That is to come.
Everything was updated in my AMT and just checked and have 8 new Hints to follow.
All of the Images in this collection are appropriately Cited, In the right Category, the Filenames are the way I want them and the Image Caption is the way I want them. Research logs on everyone.
Back to the earlier work, I was able to cross reference the Death Certificate Numbers from my manual search with what is now on Ancestry for 5 of the 21, which means I'll be on the look out for 16 more, as they become available on Ancestry. AND I have a ToDo list for each of those 16 people.
I am really liking this working on a specific collection at a time. The time involved doing the many steps that I take is greatly reduced as I don't have to try to remember, how do I do that?
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Copyright © 2014 by H R Worthington
