Prompt:  List some vital signs. Talk about specific birth, marriage and death certificates. Topics may include misspelled names, fudged dates, other anomalies that stand out in your records.

This is an interesting topic, and in fact, I blogged about something related to this very issue a few months ago.  In that post I discussed how the month of death differed from the age at death on a death certificate.  The problem was, there was no birth date indicated on the certificate so various other sources had to be consulted to sort this out.

Most recently, I’ve been perusing the Cook County, Illinois birth certificates on Family Search’s pilot search.  One of the nice things about this search is that it also searches by the mother’s name.  Had it not been for that, I may not have come across the certificates for some of my relatives.  Why?  Because there were no given names issued on the certificates!  Luckily, I had information from other sources so I was able to figure out which certificate belonged to which person.

At the same time I was finding these, I read a post over at TransylvanianDutch questioning the indexing of these records.  I followed the trail to ChicagoGenealogy and learned about Certificate of Corrections.  I wonder if there are any of these documents for my relatives to indicate their given name.  Some day, I will try to figure that out just to have a record of it.