Self Help

Vital records are among the most modern type of documents available to genealogists. Their history in the English-speaking world dates back from the beginning of the Reformation, when the Church of England, following its break with Rome in 1538, instructed its individual parishes to maintain registers of baptisms, marriages, and deaths. Despite this 16th century origin, vital records were not uniformly required by statute or maintained as a standard practice in either Europe or the United States until the 19th or early 20th century.

The first laws requiring vital records in the American colonies were passed in Virginia and the Massachusetts Bay. In 1632, the Virginia assembly decreed that the minister of each parish report annually to the court all births, marriages, and deaths in his jurisdiction. In 1639 the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony issued the same requirement. Legislation of a similar kind was soon passed by lawmakers in other New England colonies.

Although Virginia legislated the keeping of vital records as early as 1632, these laws were not generally enforced. This lack of concern reflects a problem with such records in the South until the 19th century. The failure to keep them in a systematic way during the Colonial period and after can be attributed to the high rate of geographical mobility that characterized the South during that era.

Families often migrated four or five times, especially in the decades after the Revolution, always in search of a new and productive land. Because the population was so unstable, legal documents such as wills were not always used, and inheritance of property, though always a serious matter, occurred informally, often before the death of the father or grandfather.

Americans changed their attitude toward vital records only when they realized how useful these records could be for developing statistics concerning health and sanitation. Organizations such as the American Medical Association, the American Statistical Association, and the National Board of Health, all created during the middle decades of the
19th century, convinced both federal and state leaders of the value of maintaining such records. In 1841, Massachusetts became the first state to pass legislation requiring vital records to be maintained on a state level.

In early New England, it was often the custom to record births in family groups, usually one or two families per page in the record book. Sometimes the births would be listed shortly after they occurred, but usually they were recorded all at once (though sometimes before the couple stopped having children). Therefore, the place where a birth is recorded is not always the actual place of birth.

Even if your family lived in a town where vital records were kept, their names still may not appear. Parents were generally responsible for making certain that their children’s births were properly recorded. Some families carefully entered them in the family book, but failed to notify the town clerk. The town clerk might not have performed his duties carefully, or one or more of the town record books might have been lost over time. Any one of these causes might prevent you from finding vital records for your ancestor.