Our Lineage

…would anyone care to join me?

I knew it was too good to be true.  I really did.  Honest.

Free can only last so long.  So what is my major malfunction?  About a week or so ago, I heard that FamilySearch had removed various images from its collection of Cook County, Illinois records.  I didn’t realize the extent of the collection or more appropriately – the extent of my use of it – until the last few days.

From the FamilySearch website:

Due to the provisions and guidelines of a newly revised contract with Cook County,  FamilySearch has removed all images for Illinois, Cook County vital records from its historical records collections online; free indexes to the collections will remain.

As part of our new agreement, FamilySearch will receive an additional 4.7 million records for FamilySearch patrons from the over 9 million free indexed records in the Cook County collection. The following collections are affected by the change:

• Illinois, Cook County Birth Certificates, 1878-1922
• Illinois, Cook County Birth Registers, 1871-1915
• Illinois, Cook County Deaths, 1878-1922
• Illinois, Cook County Marriages, 1871-1920

They also tell you that you have three choices to obtain the images:
1.  Ordering the microfilm and viewing it at a nearby Family History Library.
2.  Going to the Cook County Genealogy website and pay $15 for each image (!!!).
3.  Request a digital copy from the Family History Library (photo duplication).

So I am having a pity party – something that I was using at least weekly, has now become a bit more difficult and a bit more expensive.

While I have spent many hours in front of a microfilm reader and can certainly go ‘old school’… it sure was nice to go and search through some images when I woke up at 3:00am thinking about those darn elusive ancestors!

Final thoughts:  the goal is to get more people interested and engaged in genealogy, right? The note above from FamilySearch states that they will get additional access to records from Cook County – meaning one more resource for those records – so I will try to keep that in mind as I continue to find ancestors from the index, sans the image.