The NYS State Dept. of Health has become a real pain in the rear.
Rather than taking 6 (or more) months to respond they should consider the
vital records as a business. If they started giving better response time than
they would definately get more business. Instead they are trying to push you
to write to local officials when the State has copies of all the records.
> My questions are:
> 1. Is the local registrar the County Clerk
In most cases, NO. The records are where in the Town or Village
Clerks office. The exception is Monroe County where they created a County
Department of Health than demanded that the Town clerks send in all the birth
and death records. The Town clerks (in Monroe Co.) still have the marriage
records.
Seeing as the records are still with the Town and Village clerks than
you would have to know the exact Town to write to. The biggest problem is
that a person's records might not necessarily be in the Town that they lived
in. You could and can go to any Town to get a marriage license. The death
certificate nowadays is usually made out by the funeral director and he may
not be in the Town that the person lived in. Etc.... These are reasons that I
always suggest writng to the State office even if they take a year.
If you can get to Albany then go to the NYS Archives. They have the
only publically accessable copy of the index to vital records. It may be
worth the trip.
> 2. Would this local office maybe have data older than the 1880 cutoff that the state has.
There was an attempt to start keeping vital records in 1847. The
system was set up with the school districts collecting the records. The
system broke down by 1851. A few towns still have these records. Besides
those records, the majority of the state didn't start keeping vital records
until 1880. New York City is an exception. They started keeping vital records
sometime in the 1850s. Rochester for some unknown reason has marriage records
beginning 1875. To make matters worse, there wasn't any penalty for NOT
filing a vital record until after the turn of the century so sometimes you
won't find a vital record for an event between 1880 and 1900.
New York State isn't easy!
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