Among the newly released records at FamilySearch’s Record Search are death records for Louisiana. This thrilled me, of course, for two reasons. First, we’ve been doing the brickwall series focused on the Gines family in Louisiana. Ironically, when the FamilySearch records were posted, I had just sent off to the Louisiana Secretary of State a request for copies of certified records. Second, I had worked on indexing nearly a thousand of those records. What is unfortunate for the time being is that our indexing was done from images of the actual death certificates, yet the release is only a searchable database without images.
When I was indexing the records, I came across no actual or suspected family members. But in the released database there are a lot of them! The database is much more extensive than either Ancestry.com’s Louisiana death records or the Louisiana Archives database upon which the Ancestry.com records are based.
There were some unusual things I found with respect to the Gines family in the database, and I’ll be writing about that soon.
July 4th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
I must tell you how much I always enjoy reading your blog. My ancestors are mainly from TN and MD, but I’m researching my stepmom’s Louisiana ancestors and finding that state more than a little difficult. The first thought I had when I saw that death records release was how different it was from the others & you’ve answered that here. I will check them out!
July 6th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
Thanks, Robyn! Good luck in your search!