Georgia death certificates 1919-1927 now online

FamilySearch has announced the completion of two new online projects and asks for volunteers to help them in a third, according to an article on Tribstar.com, "FamilySearch completes two new online projects."

FamilySearch Record Services, the Georgia Archives, and the Georgia State Office of Vital Records and Statistics recently entered into a cooperative effort to place the Georgia death certificates online. Now approximately 275,000 Georgia death records from 1919-1927 can be viewed for free at one of two Web sites. The sites have an online searchable index that is linked to a scanned digital image of each death record. These can be viewed by going to www.GeorgiaArchives.org (go to the virtual vault), or at labs.familysearch.org.

FamilySearch is also launching a Latin America project and needs 10,000 volunteers who can read both English and Spanish to help index Mexican, Argentine, and other Latin American records for placement on the Internet. The first records to be indexed will be the 1930 Mexican census. Volunteers would download one census page at a time onto their home computers, index that page, and send it back to Family search. Each page would take about 30 minutes to index and volunteers would work at their own pace, accepting only as many pages as they have time for. If you want to be a part of this exciting project, register at FamilySearchIndexing.org. Por favor!

Could You Live Without Salt?

Today we take salt for granted, and aside from cooking, don't bother much with it. But in the years of the Civil War, our ancestors relied on it for tanning leather, making dyes, curing meats and maintaining the health of their farm animals.

That's why when the Union soldiers blockaded the major salt mines and shipments from Europe the Confederate states began to ration salt to families. Aside from an interesting history lesson, there's a genealogical resource hidden away in the salt lists recorded by the courts in the southern states. While many have only been reproduced in print, some are online and indexed for researchers.