Carnahan Releases 1960 Death Certificates Online February 14th 2011

From the SOS Office: Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan today announced that the Missouri State Archives has placed all 49,000 of the state’s 1960 death certificates online. Each year the Archives, a division of her office, places another year of records online, as they become 50 years old. This year’s addition was released a full month early because of the work of over 275 volunteers from around the world.

Local volunteers worked at the Archives to clean and organize the certificates, but the majority of the volunteers helped from home by transcribing the original certificates into an electronic index using a new e-Volunteer web application. The transcription portion of this process, which took 48 days last year, was finished in three days this year.

“My office works hard to make Missouri’s historical records available to the public,” Carnahan said. “Without people around Missouri and the world volunteering their time, completing projects like the death certificates database would take much longer. I’m thankful to all the volunteers that helped with this project, and everything else we do in the Archives, to help make our state’s past accessible to Missourians.”

The newly-released 1960 death certificates include those of Walthall Moore, Sr., the first African American to serve in the Missouri General Assembly, and Francis “Frank” P. O’Hare, the journalist who edited and published the Socialist monthly National Rip-Saw.

The Missouri State Archives first placed a searchable index to Missouri’s death certificates online in April 2006. Images of all the certificates were added by March 2008. Today, historians, genealogists, and other researchers have free, immediate access to more than 2.26 million death certificates from 1910-1960, including those of famous Missourians like Alexander Franklin James (aka Frank James) and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

To view the 1910-1960 death certificates, go to http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/deathcertificates/. If you are interested in volunteering with the Archives, please call (573) 526-6711 or e-mail .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). The new e-Volunteer web application will next be used to provide access to World War I and World War II service cards and to expand the 1912 Missouri death certificates index.