Why can’t more places do this?
When my dad first researched our family history, he drove to remote courthouses, libraries, and archives in search of dates, documents, or other traces of the Clark family that settled in Perry County, Ohio in the early 1820s.
I recently did remote research myself. Sitting seven hours away in Scranton, Pennsylvania I checked the Ohio Historical Society’s web page to find the death certificates of most of my great grandfather’s siblings. The organization has an index of death certificates filed between 1913 and 1944. Enter the name and county, and the web site pulls the volume and certificate number from its database.
Last week, my dad got back in the car and drove two hours to the state archives. Armed with the certificate numbers that I gave him, Dad easily found microfilm copies of the death records. I got them in the mail yesterday. Deaths in 1922, 1933, 1936, and 1940.
My ancestors – and their relatives – never could have imagined that it would be possible to learn so much about them so quickly and so easily from anywhere in the world.
