Records at Seeking Michigan

I have seen the Seeking Michigan website on a couple of lists of the best state genealogy websites and with good reason. I have mentioned using the Seeking Michigan website to find death certificates (1897-1920), but there is much more to explore.  The Seeking Michigan website has recently been revised and it appears that they are still adding functionality.  To jump right in, you will find the search box at the upper right of the screen.  Select a category by checking the appropriate box.

When you go to the home page you will see several categories: Seek, Discover and Look, Teach and Buy. If you want to learn a little more about the collections hover over each category.  Seek allows you to select from guides (a list of links to holdings in various categories of the Archives of Michigan), indexes (for a few records) and contact information.  Look contains recent articles on various topics and a search box to locate more (e.g. the Kalamazoo Corset Co. or Malcolm X in Michigan).  Teach has information for K-12 teachers to help them introduce children to the past (e.g. using a pioneer child's account).  The Buy page is pretty self-explanatory.  Near the top of the page you can hover over and select from collections, prints and records.  Discover is where the bulk of the records on this site lie.

Hover over Discover and you can choose from civic history (death records, civil war service records, films and plat maps), family history (civil war manuscripts, civil war photographs, civil war battle flags, early photography, oral histories, music of Michigan, main streets and architecture), death records and civil war.  If you hover over the civil war option you can further select events, the reveille blog original material (the same ones you will find under civic and family history) and resources.  If you have ancestors who served in a Michigan unit during the Civil War a number of collections worth looking at, particularly. Most of these documents have not been indexed, meaning that if you are looking for references to a particular soldier you can't simply type his name into the search box and expect pages of hits. The philosophy was that researchers would rather have access to all of the documents right away rather than have only a few indexed ones. While it is a bit tedious to hunt page by page for your people, it is certainly better than having nothing to hunt through at all.

Some details of the different collections are as follows.  Civil War manuscripts (letters and diaries of soldiers), Civil War service records (monthly returns, muster rolls, etc sent to the Adjutant General), Civil War photographs, government land office plat maps (largely from the 1820s and 1830s), other varieties of maps (1841 to circa 1900), Main streets (old photographs and postcards from throughout Michigan), lighthouses, early Michigan documents and several other categories.

I am happy to report that thanks to the revision of the website, navigating and downloading documents is now straight-forward.  The quirks that made things difficult to find and save in their entirety are no longer issues.  To quickly show you how the new page is set up I'll look at the Civil War service record collection. In the search box, type in the unit you are interested in (I chose the “Lancers”). Click on a particular set of records from the results list.  Near the top of the screen you will see the document identifier (Box 132, Folder 3, Document 1, for example).  Immediately above the document is a slider you can use to increase the size of the image on your screen. You also have the option to "fit to window" or "fit to width."  You can also simply drag the edges of the box (right middle and/or bottom middle) to increase the size of the document window.  You can easily print or save (in one of three sizes) with a click of a button just above the document screen.  On the right hand side of the screen is a scroll down box containing thumbnails of all of the documents within that folder.  Clicking on “Next” will take you to the next document in the folder or you can simply click on the thumbnail.  When you have finished perusing all of the documents in the folder and wish to go to the next hit from the search results page, click the right arrow near the upper right of the screen where it indicates "Results, 1 of 3," for example. 

The Seeking Michigan website is now more user-friendly.  The records are now easy to navigate and save.  I wish to thank them for all of the time and effort it took to digitize the images so that those of us who can't visit in person can still access these records. I know how time consuming it is to scan in family photos and documents, having just finished a bunch in early March.  I hope they continue to receive funding to carry on this valuable work!

Note:  As of September 2012, Seeking Michigan has added 1894 Michigan state census records for nine counties to their website.  To learn more see:  Seeking Michigan's Census Secret.

Sources for Kalamazoo Death Records

If you are searching for death records there are a number of places that you can look for them in Michigan and Kalamazoo in particular. If you have many ancestors who died in Michigan you can count yourself lucky that civil registration began in 1867, unlike many states in which birth, marriage and death records were not required until after the turn of the century. Before you anticipate finding every death record occurring during the early years after 1867, you may want to curb your expectations. In my experience, birth and death records appear to be spotty for a decade or so.

A good place to begin is Family Search. You can start with the name and county and/or state and see how many results your search generates. On the left margin of the screen you can narrow your results by adding more information. Just remember, less is more. If you add too many search criteria you may miss what you are looking for. Parents or birthplace, for instance, may be listed as “unknown” and if you fill those in, the result may not show up or be so low on the list you won't find it. Also keep in mind that the records here have been transcribed and I'm sure we've all seen incorrect transcriptions.

If you believe your people died in Kalamazoo county you may also want to check www.kalamazoogenealogy.org. I often peruse the entire section of the index where my surname of interest appears to see if I can find any other family members. Remember that the death index (though not the records) goes through 1975 so you will probably have more luck finding mid-century deaths than at FamilySearch (at least in my experience).

You will find death records at Family Search and www.kalamazoogenealogy.org, but if your people died in 1897 or later there should also be a death certificate. Why look for both? Because some information may appear on one and not on the other. For instance, death certificates often list place of burial (something that Kalamazoo death records don't include). Another reason to seek both death records and death certificates is that a piece of information may be legible on one record, but not on the other. Seeking Michigan has digitized death certificates from 1897 to 1920. I always use the advanced search as anything else leaves me hopelessly buried in data. It is useful to remember that the search algorithm here does not search for name variants. If you search for “John” it will not pull out “Jon” or “Jonathon.” I often search on the last name and county to start. Just keep trying variations of your search until you find what you are looking for. One technique I have found useful both at Family Search and Seeking Michigan is to search on parents' names. If the names are uncommon try searching with one or both first names only. Or to identify potential sisters of a male relative try searching on the father's surname. This allowed me to locate two sisters (whose first names I didn't know) for one of my people. A look at the informant (as well as subsequent information found) helped to confirm the connection.

For more recent deaths, Ancestry.com has a database of Michigan deaths from 1971-1996. If you don't have a subscription, ask if your local library does.

Unfortunately, online death records for Michigan are pretty spotty during a good part of the 20^th century. You may have to get creative or be patient. If your ancestors died in Kalamazoo county you can use the index at kalamazoogenealogy.org to at least determine the year of death. You can also search through the Kalamazoo County Clerk's office online. Click on “search for vital records” and follow the prompts. The results here are limited in scope, but you will usually get a specific date of death. Armed with this information you can search for an obituary at the Kalamazoo Public Library in their Local Newspaper Database.  Even if an obituary has not yet been indexed they can be ordered through the KPL for just $2 if you aren't able to go in and look it up yourself.

Just a couple more notes on death records. Sometimes you really have to dig to find what you are looking for. From the KPL index I found an obituary for one of my people, but I hadn't found a death record under her surname. As the obit indicated she died in Kalamazoo I felt there simply had to be a death record. Since I now knew when she died, I went through the death records page by page until I found it. Whoever had recorded the information wrote her name as Harrington instead of Harrigan (her maiden name confirmed her identity).

One other instance highlights the importance of thinking about your findings. Before I found the newspaper article describing how poor John Flynn bled out after he fell from a scaffold and his hod pierced his side (see my post Casting a Wide Net in Newspaper Searches), I had two, yes two, death records for him. I'm still not sure how this happened, but at first I was unsure which was the correct record. The first record was entered into the ledger on 4-30-1888 with the following details: John Flynn, death date 6-22-1887, age 64, married, died in Ann Arbor “in fall from 6^th floor of building,” born in Ireland, parents John/Mary Flynn, mason. The second record was entered on 6-1-1889 and had the exact same information except it listed the death date as 6-18-1888. In my opinion it was just too much of a coincidence that two men with all of the same identifiers would die in the same manner a year apart. My working hypothesis was that it was the same man and the death had inadvertently been entered twice. But which date was correct? When I stopped to think about it, it became clear that the first date had to be the right one. Unless the clerk's office employed a psychic, there could be no death record on the books before the death actually occurred.  As with everything else, it pays to think about the information you are finding.

One-Stop Shopping for Kalamazoo Records

Happy did not begin to describe my feelings when I discovered the page set up by Joe Ferrara at Kalamazoo Genealogy. Joe has spent countless hours working on this page which contains copies from the Kalamazoo County vital records books, among other things. Civil registration began in Michigan in 1867 for births, marriages and deaths, though for the first decade or so after that, I have found birth and death records to be a bit spotty. Some marriage records were recorded as early as 1831. The records available on this site are as follows:

Birth Index: 1867-1909 (birth records are closed to the public for 100 years to protect privacy)

Birth Records: 1867-1903

Marriage Index: 1831-1975

Marriage Records: 1831-1941

Death Index: 1867-1975

Death Records: 1867-1933

Before you jump right into the actual records you will first need to look up the person in the index so that you can make note of the book and page number. Armed with this information you can then go to the appropriate book and page to view the record. Right-click to save to your computer. In cases in which you need to scroll down to view the second page of the record you will need to right-click again in order to save the second page.

Another place you should be sure to check out is at the bottom of the Kalamazoo county vital records page. Where it says “Other Records” you can click on a link to the Kalamazoo Public Library Vital Records. Joe describes it as follows: (1800s-1940s) burial, biographic, & obit citations. Church records: baptisms, marriages, adoptions, & membership. Here, Joe has copied the card file from the library. The church records are only from a few of the older congregations in town, but if your family attended you may find a wealth of information. Search by surname and click on the highlighted section to bring up a photo of the card. For a key to the abbreviations on the card click on the drop down menus at the top of the page. Be sure to check alternate spellings of the name.

But wait, there's more. Joe has also added cemetery records (various throughout Kalamazoo county), some family trees, select city and county directories (1860-1935, usually every 5 years), basic maps (1861, 1873, 1890, 1913), school yearbook records, WWI veteran information (from books at the library), transcribed obituaries from the Schoolcraft Express (1917-1972) and some probate records (1831-1857). These may all be searched individually or you can use the search function to look across all non-vital records by surname.

Be sure to scroll down to see Joe's links to other helpful Kalamazoo sites as well as some from southwest Michigan and state-wide. As of the writing of this blog there are 240,000 files on the site. Joe deserves a great, big thank you from all of us who have benefited from his hours of work on the site. As I live out-of-state, I can easily say that I would not have made nearly so much progress on my own family history if not for the information I have found here.