Early Birth Record Books Added to Indexes

Birth Records of Williamson County, Illinois, Book One (1877-1883) transcribed by Dorothy Boyd  (2,469 entries)

Williamson County, Illinois Birth Records 1877-1879 Volume 1 by Mary Jo Moore (3,126 entries)

Williamson County, Illinois Birth Records 1879-1881 Volume 2 by Mary Jo Moore (2,767 entries)

Apparently, the first attempt to record births in the state of Illinois occurred in 1877, however I am reasonably sure that many births were never recorded during this period.

The three books recently added are transcripts from the Williamson County birth book 1 that got registered. The birth records are handwritten and hard to read. Information found in the birth records are supposed to contain, but don’t always have the name, birth date, place of birth, residence and nationality of the parents, as well as the names of the parents, the fathers occupation, number of children born to the mother and the name of the person who attended the birth. Unfortunately many of the records are incomplete and often the child was yet to be named and only has the sex of the child, date of birth and parent’s names to go by which is better than nothing.

These books are duplicates of each other for the same period, Moore’s books contains indexing to each separate name and the Boyd book contains the parents indexed on the same line as the child. Since the books are hard to read, having two versions of the same information could be a good thing since there might be a better chance of identifying the person you are looking for.

The indexing for these books has been placed in the Misc. County Records Index which can be found under the Records tab.

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