I first worked on my children\u2019s Belgian ancestors years ago when manual searches of records was the only option. When using the vital records from the 19th century, I used them the way I had other European records from the same time span. I looked in the \u201cbook\u201d for the time period of interest and read through the entries for the years I thought included the person\u2019s birth date. Then, if I had the correct person and had the names of the parents, I scanned the years before and after the birth to locate siblings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I began my searches of these records using the same approach. I had never used the records before, but knew from the catalog description they were organized chronologically so I would use the approach I had used in church records for other areas of Europe. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Imagine my surprise when after I had spent some time manually searching records for the desired time frame and person of interest, I found indexes that had been created every ten years by the priest. I had never encountered these decennial indexes before. While indexes are not perfect, they would have saved me a great deal of time, particularly when I had a specific name and time frame in which to look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Moral-the first time you use any \u201cnew\u201d record, familiarize yourself with the whole thing first, don\u2019t assume that it is like every other one you have ever used.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I first worked on my children\u2019s Belgian ancestors years ago when manual searches of records was the only option. When using the vital records from the 19th century, I used them the way I had other European records from the same time span. I looked in the \u201cbook\u201d for the time period of interest and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":153979,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/153979"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31814\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}