California Vital Records May Fill In The Blanks About Your Ancestors

By Billy Woodard


All information that pertain to a person's life, as in their birth, marriage and death certificates are kept at California vital records. This information is imperative to discovering the genealogy of a person. Once you find these records you can begin to fill in the history of the person's life.

If there is a family Bible maintained, it really helps in the beginning of a research on a particular person. Births, marriages and deaths are usually correctly listed there. Researchers can obtain information from other members of the family to know about the lives and deaths of ancestors.

Local church documents such as birth and baptism files or book entries are another good source. Remember to check the accuracy of the information you find. In early days the only place birth and baptism details where kept, was the church.

The first priority is to locate the church so that the important information can be obtained from it. It is often not possible find the correct facts since many names of parents are recorded with initials and not the full names. So, one has to depend on clues to get information about the children of the same parents.

Once birth records were introduced, they gave more accurate information with the parents' names. Difficult to spell last names were sometimes written phonetically. Using different spellings for the same family is quite common. Still, there may be cases where the full names are not listed. Some entries may have first names only and in some other cases, the middle name only.

The same problem exists with old marriage and death certificates. The information can become confusing when there is more than one person with the same given name within the family. History shows that particularly male family members inherited the same Christian name of forefathers.

Census records help a lot in getting the vital information about persons. In these, details of the individuals along with those of their spouses and children are all recorded. Thus, a fairly accurate description of a person can be accessed. There are still chances of errors in spellings. When using the services of California vital records, explore more than one source of information. The dates can be considered correct if all the data match. It is better to take the time to do this instead of finding that you were following the wrong family ancestry.




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