My encounter with the Clark County [Ohio] Public Library should have been the first clue. I wrote them to order a batch of obituaries I found on the RB Hayes Obituary Index (a source no Ohio researcher should be without). At the end of the note I added that I was hoping to find an obit for John KOHL, whose death date had been narrowed down to sometime between the 1900 US Census and 1904. I thought this was overly optimistic of me, but if you don’t ask, you don’t get.
Well, I sure enough got. Not only did I get the obituary, I got a photocopy of a register page of deaths in Springfield, showing the record of his death. This is material that a respected professional firm didn’t come up with in a microfilm search of the FHL’s Clark County records.
But yesterday I was preparing for some film to come into my local FHC, so I was trying to set up the correct sources in TMG ahead of time. I went looking for the Greene County (Ohio) archives on the web. I found them here… and discovered that the early birth and death records originally generated by the Probate Court are available online!
Now, as pleasant a surprise as this is, I probably shouldn’t complain. But I wouldn’t be the technologist I am if I didn’t have better ways to do things. 🙂 The software they appear to be using to serve up the images looks similar to that used by the NEHGS, and I find its lack of drag and drop support annoying beyond words. Instead of being able to move a rectangle representing the visible subset of the enlarged page, one has to click. And wait. And click. And wait. Heck, my browser handles large graphical files better than that. Just serve up the raw images and let me at them, ok?
Complaints notwithstanding, I see lots of browsing (and clicking, and waiting) in my future, to see if I can find the TIERNEYs born in the village of Osborn.
