It Is All In The Spelling!

We had an intriguing incident the other day at the library. A patron was having difficulty finding a death certificate.

The patron had located a record of her ancestor’s Texas death certificate listed on Ancestry.com ’s database. When she went to the Mormon website, familysearch.org, like we suggested she do, she was not able to locate the certificate.

The Ancestry Texas death certificate database gives the death certificate number and since the Dallas Public Library happens to own the microfilm of the Texas death certificates we went to the microfilm.

We found the certificate with no problem. Upon looking at the handwriting on the death certificate the problem became apparent. Ancestry used the database-like alphabetical index on the Texas State death certificate index which is typewritten. There, the decedent’s  name was plainly “Golden”.

However, when looking at the actual handwritten death certificate the “O” in Golden looks like an “A” and appeared as Galden. Thus, Familysearch.org apparently used the death certificate rather than the death index for their database. Looking further down in the death certificate there were other obvious words that are spelled with “o” s that also appeared to be spelled with “a” s.

To be sure the death certificate was actually in the Familtserach.org database we did a search for “Galden” and there it was just as it was supposed to be!