Sunday, December 7, 2008

Finding Records Online – Georgia

There are several places online that house records from Georgia. First of all let’s look at the records that have been completed by the FamilySearch Indexing project. One of the first groups of records that were placed online at http://pilot.familysearch.org was the Georgia death certificates. These death certificates cover the time between 1914-1927. Additionally the FamilySearch website has various US census records that also cover the state of Georgia.

The state of Georgia has been putting some of their records online at the Georgia Virtual Vault at http://content.sos.state.ga.us. This site has a variety of records including the same death certificates as found on the FamilySearch website, Confederate enlistment and pension records, wills and deeds from several counties, Spanish-American War records, militia enlistment papers, trademark papers, historic maps and photographs and several other types of records. You can search all of these databases at the same time and download copies of all the documents for your own records. Searching through the Civil War pension records may result in finding other documents. A quick search led me to copies of marriage records, funeral home records, handwritten letters, and other documents used to prove widow’s rights or pensioner's service. The Virtual Vault also has some older records, including colonial wills from 1733-1779.

Another site for Georgia records is the DocuWeb database found at http://docuweb.gsu.edu/scripts/webmain.dll?Anonymous. This site has indexed records from various counties as well as Civil War Pension Records. To use this site select Browse, then select the record type you want to view. A list of names will appear and you can select the names you are interested in. This site has been glitchy lately and it may take several visits to it to get the records you are looking for. It appears that this site is being abandoned for a new system that is currently not active in the public web.

I hope some of these sites are helpful in your search for Georgia ancestors.

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