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IGI—International Genealogical Index
If you wish to find a possible marriage, birth, or christening date of an ancestor born in a foreign country, such as Germany, or in a U.S. region such as New England, the IGI is the place to check. Because this is the largest database of extracted vital records in the world, it would be foolish to ignore its clues. The IGI lists individuals, however, not families. When you are looking for families which link together for several generations, the next source is more applicable. However, as you will learn, don't skip sources and milk every source for every clue possible. For example, while the IGI doesn't automatically link complete families, if you use the IGI in its CD or computer format, you can ask for a "Parent Search" which will bring up all the children of a couple. You must be creative, however, in order to find all the possible spellings of your ancestor as the husband or wife might be listed slightly different in various extracts of the records and they might not be so easy to pull up. You may ask that all spellings of your name be searched at once to make this easier for you, but look under all possible spelling variations and abbreviations for given names. The sources for the IGI , as you learned, come from original records and user submissions. Therefore another goal of this file could be to locate other people working on your line. This is part of a preliminary survey. |
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