One of my favorite aspects of helping people with their family history is the challenge of quickly becoming familiar with resources for an area I have not previously researched. It’s a little like becoming a jack-of-all-trades genealogist. Of course the second part of that would make me a master-of-none but let’s not worry about that. 🙂
Recently I have helped two different individuals that had Missouri ancestors. In my efforts to help I became somewhat familiar with the Missouri Digital Heritage website. This website is full of collections! They have a section they call their Genealogy Collections. I spent most of my time using the Death Certificates collection. This site has lots of records which is great, but the search features are not great. Your terms have to exactly match the index. I had found several individuals on findagrave that didn’t come up easily on the MDH website. I had to get pretty creative. Thankfully you don’t have to put something in every search field in order to search so eventually I was able to find them all. Several were so poorly indexed that I had to search by death year and county only and then look through the entire list before I found the death record I was searching for. Having said that – this website is still a fabulous find if you have Missouri ancestors. Everything I searched was free and had images. You can’t beat that! Free AND with the images, my favorite.
I have family on my dad’s side from Missouri, and have used this site a couple of times (county histories and birth & death records) and definitely agree on the search features issue!!
Glad I’m not the only one to feel this way!
Good to know! Thanks for posting this info! I will check it out.
Glad to help. Thanks for stopping by!
You are so right about the stretching out part. I’m trying to help some of the sites, non-profit and for profit, photograph or transcribe records and it’s really really interesting. There is also http://www.genealogicalstudies.com where I am taking courses and that’s been really helpful in improving my skills. Love your posts.
Thank you!
I jump for joy whenever I find another part of my family who spent time in Missouri simply because of this website. I’ve gotten my hands on so many death and birth certificates because of it! Another of my faves is seekingmichigan.org.
It is pretty fantastic. I’ll have to check out the Michigan website. Thanks for the tip!