Sunday, October 19, 2008

Blog Comments Challenge

Kathryn at Looking4ancestors challenged other genealogy bloggers to visit and leave comments on at least 10 blogs this week. Well, I did it. I found alot of genealogy blogs that I hadn't visited before, and became a follower of some of them. Here is the list of blogs that I commented on:

1. Looking4Ancestors

2. Kimberley’s Genealogy Blog

3. 24-7 Family History Circle

4. GenBlog

5. The Educated Genealogist

6.Think Genealogy

7. The Ballycastle Blog

8. Genea-Musings

9. Photo Detective

10. Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter

Thanks for the challenge, Kathryn.

Cook County Vital Records—Another Update

Yesterday, at the Illinois State Genealogical Society’s 40th Anniversary Conference, a representative of the Cook County Clerk’s office provided an update on the status of their vital records digitization project.

The Clerk’s website currently provides access to 8 million records. Additional records are being added to the website regularly. These include: 1) records which become newly available under Illinois state law (births-after 75 years; marriages-after 50 years; deaths-after 20 years) and 2) older records which have been newly indexed and digitized. When I asked the representative for a rough estimate of when the digitization of the older records would be complete, she estimated it would be finished in 1-2 years.

The representative indicated that anyone who has a problem with a record that they download should contact the Clerk’s office by email. The office has retained the records in book and microfilm form, so if a download is unreadable, or does not match the index, they are able to help you get the record that you need.

The Cook County Clerk’s website can be found at: http://www.cookcountygenealogy.com/