1970 Missouri Death Certificate Indexing is Live! – January 14, 2021

I missed this e-mail from last week – 1970 Missouri Death Certificate Indexing is Live!: https://s1.sos.mo.gov/records/archives/evolunteers/. Thought it should be time to start indexing. The more people who volunteer, the faster it goes.

Go ahead and reread the instructions and the guidelines listed below:

·         Try your best! If something is messy or hard to read, do the best you can. Two to four indexers look at each record, so if you cannot read something, that is perfectly all right. There is no need to mark the certificate with “Illegible, Invalid or Missing Field(s).”

·         Remember to always put a period after an initial or abbreviation, even if there isn’t one on the certificate.

·         Only use the “Missing Name (Blank/Infant/Unknown/Unnamed)” note when the deceased person’s name is missing or unknown.  If a parent or spouse’s name is missing, don’t flag the certificate or put “Unknown” in the indexing field; instead, leave the parent or spouse’s name field blank.

·     If the decedent is an infant without a first name (i.e. Infant, Baby Girl/Boy, Unknown, Twin A/B), make sure to add the note “Missing Name (Blank/Infant/Unknown/Unnamed).”  Enter Infant as the first name if this is the case.

·         Do not forget the age! This will allow us to reverse engineer the year of birth. We are just interested in the year, not months or days. Anyone under a year old should get a 0 in the year field.

·         There is no need to mark if the spouse is dead or divorced. We just need their name. If all it says is “Deceased” or “Divorced,” leave the field blank.

·         If a parent or spouse has a prefix or suffix (Dr., Sr., etc.), you can ignore it.

·         If a Social Security Number is too short or too long, mark it as “No” and add the note “Invalid SSN”.

·         If a Social Security Number has a letter at the end, such as 123-45-6789A, ignore the letter and enter the last four digits. The letter corresponds to a person’s Social Security claim and is not part of their Social Security Number.

·         Be careful once you get to St. Louis certificates. If the “County” field is blank and it says St. Louis in the city field, mark the dropdown menu as “St. Louis City.”

As always, let me know if there are questions at any point along the way and most importantly, have fun!

Sincerely,

Daniel Reeder

eVolunteer Coordinator

Missouri State Archives

PO Box 1747

Jefferson City, MO 65102