VITAL STATISTICS DOCUMENTS ARE IMPORTANT

Don't Start Your Ancestry Research Without Them!

by Joelle Steele

The first things I need before I can start tracing anyone's lineage are vital statistics documents. These are critical to accuracy in tracing lineage. So, if you want to trace your own family tree or have me or anyone else do it, you need to send away for those records: birth certificates for yourself, your parents, and your grandparents (maternal and paternal). For anyone who is no longer alive, death and marriage certificates are also very helpful.

What's on these documents that make them so important? Well, you might think it's the names, dates, and places of birth or death. But it is so much more than that. All of these documents also contain things like the number of the child (e.g., 4th of 7 children), which indicates how many siblings a person had. They also contain the parents' correct names, their countries of origin, what their occupations were, hospitals or homes where they were born, causes of death, informant of death, funeral home where taken, and cemetery where interred. And with marriage certificates you can often find out if it's a first or later marriage and where they were living at the time, etc. No end to the information in these docs.

This is a lot of information with a lot of clues about your family's ancestry. If you want to know about them, you need to know as much as can be found in these documents. That's the best starting place when tracing lineage. The farther back you go with documents, te more accuracy in the tracing. There will always be missing information here and there, but starting with these docs will always save you time, and possibly money, while helping to prevent misdirection into the wrong family tree.