30 July 2010

NEW TOTAL: 152,934

New grand total as of 31 July 2010:

152,934 entries in my pre-1920 Oklahoma Death Index.

I've been trying to add 5,000 entries each month. Some months are better than others. Lots depends on other obligations, when my kids are home from school, and what other projects I have going on. But I still try to type in records at least an hour each day.

I can usually get about 100 entries in an hour. But that rate drops when I check one source against another. For example, when I canvass a cemetery, I check my transcription against pictures on findagrave.com and okcemeteries.net. I also try to check against cemetery books at the Oklahoma History Center. Lots of duplication, but I get additional entries for stones I missed or for people whose tombstones no longer exist.

I look forward to Saturday mornings when I get a couple of hours at the Oklahoma History Center. So many records...so little time. Oh well, I intended this to be a long term project in the first place.

21 July 2010

Reader BEWARE!

I was looking through the Okfuskee County GenWeb cemetery listings and made an interesting and possible major discovery. I found in the A through E surnames almost 200 children that died within about 3 months of each other in 1902, if I remember right.

The trend continued in the F surname listing and I started getting suspicious. So I checked against some of the photos on Findagrave.com. Only a handful actually died during what I thought was the "epidemic" time period. Most lived to be adults and died in the mid to late 1900s.

Apparently the person inputting data/setting up the database either intentionally put in wrong information to mess up people copying data, or unintentionally made some kind of input or programming error.

The point here is to corroborate information! Don't settle for the first source you come across. Whenever possible, verify information with a different source. You will save yourself time, trouble and embarassment!

16 July 2010

NEW TOTAL: 149,432 entries

The first two weeks of July have been, as they said on the Saturday Night Live of my youth, "Very, very good to me"! Almost to me end of the year goal of 150,000 pre-1920 death records in Oklahoma. PLEASE...realize that is not 150,000 individuals, but 150,000 individual records. Some individuals have 5 to 10 entries, depending on how "popular" or "famous" they were in their community. Lots more counties to go. I'll shoot for 175,000 by the end of the year!

12 July 2010

NEW TOTAL: 142,905 entries

As of 1 July 2010, the Oklahoma Death Index to 1920 is now up to 142,905 entries! Considering I was hoping to hit 150,000 by the end of 2010, it looks like I may need to revise that to 175,000! I keep adding info from cemetery records/listings, funeral home records, obituaries, etc. So if you are looking for someone who died in Oklahoma prior to 1920, e-mail me and let me check for you. Results are only $1 per name.

okdeathindex@hotmail.com

Best wishes,

Mahlon Erickson