What the Heck are Death Records? The Diary of a Born-Again Genealogist

I remember hearing my parents talk about death records when I was a child and feeling a chill go down my spine. Death? All I knew about death was skeletons and graveyards and ghosts. It turns out my parents weren’t morbid at all, nor were they fans of Edgar Allan Poe. Rather, they were genealogists and finding death records for them was like striking gold.

Yeah, I grew up taking my genealogy for granted. Perhaps better than most average Americans, I knew my roots back to the Mayflower and into Europe on one side and back to Hawaii and Japan on the other. I knew I had a scoundrel of an Irish grandfather who sold away a huge piece of prime real estate on the North Shore for a ship full of rum. I had a Japanese grandfather who ran away with a Chinese circus (I’ve tried to talk my wife into letting me return to my roots and start a career as a lion tamer, but she has turned me down flat!). In short, the work was all done for me.

Lately, however, I’ve felt the need to do some digging of my own on my wife’s side and more on my own side. I am what you could call a born-again genealogist.

I’m hoping to document my progress in this blog. As I relearn all of the terminology and learn how to use a microfiche, I’ll chronicle my exploits in this blog. I just hope I don’t run into any skeletons, ghosts, or Edgar Allan Poe, for that matter.