Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...

Thursday, August 24, 2023

Introducing ConnecticutGenealogy.org, a FREE searchable database

 

Quoting from an email announcement:

Hello again from Reclaim The Records! Today, we come into your e-mail with a long-awaited present: millions of new free genealogy records -- or at least, new searchable and downloadable indices to those millions of records, and helpful instructions on how you can order the underlying certificates, even very recent ones. And of course, we also have yet another Kafkaesque story about why the world is still missing public access to even more years of this great data, and how we're working to fix that.

Introducing ConnecticutGenealogy.org! It's a FREE searchable database of 576,638 births, 2,180,700 marriages, 2,086 civil unions, and 2,772,116 deaths from the state of Connecticut, spanning three centuries. Some of this data had been online before, scattered across several other websites, but with fewer years, in non-downloadable and non-shareable formats, locked behind paywalls, and/or with tools that couldn't handle searching the quirks and oddities in the data very well. Well, now it's all in one place, and we think we've got better data and better tools, and we're here to tell you all about it!

In addition, 

ConnecticutGenealogy.org includes the first-ever online publication of Connecticut birth index data from 1897-1917, and this new data is the only statewide index of Connecticut births that exists publicly online anywhere. (Yay!) We also acquired marriage and death index data from 1897 through 2017, while the next most complete online version of the index only had data through 2012. And our search engine is set up to better handle some of the weirdness in this data, such as the official records from 1969-1979 only having the first five letters of each person's given name, and some of the pre-1925 data missing some names entirely. Our search engine also has all the fun bells and whistles like automatic nickname and partial name searches, wildcard searches, automatic typo or letter transposition searches, date range searches (even down to the exact day, not just the year), and so on.

And we even geo-coded all the data, and we also auto-supplemented all the data with county names. 

Its been a while since I heard from Reclaim the Records and it is nice to see that they are still working away at liberating records.  

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