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the laws. Generally, we can't expect complete registration until the first quarter of the twentieth century.
    For complete information on when states began regularly keeping birth, death, and marriage registrations, and where those records can be found, see
The Family Tree Sourcebook
(Cincinnati: Family Tree Books, 2010). Internet users can check www.vitalrec.com or www.cyndislist.com/usvital.htm for similar information.
    Vital records in most areas of this country were originally kept as part of the public health movement of the late nineteenth century, and can first be found in the mortality schedules that accompanied federal population reports. Attempts were made to gather information about types, causes, prevalence, and duration of disease.
    From their inception, New England towns kept vital registration, and even though compliance was far from complete these records are immensely helpful. However, in this chapter we are speaking of the statewide civil vital registration which first began in Massachusetts in 1841, but was not instituted in many other locales until much later. Usually states began recording marriages before births and deaths. Kentucky and Ohio began recording marriages at the county level in the 1780s and early 1800s, while Pennsylvania did not begin the statewide civil recording of marriages until 1883, and South Carolina not until 1911. So, before you begin research in a particular state, be sure to determine when civil registration began. Those records are easily attainable and an important part of your research.
    When no vital records are available, what is the genealogical researcher to do? This chapter is designed to provide you with a multitude of alternate resources that can help you discover the dates that you seek. There is no guarantee you will find the birth, marriage, and death records for your ancestor in any of these sources, but when you do, the search is very rewarding. The first half of the chapter will focus on substitutes for vital registration. The majority of these records will be found for the nineteenth century, although it is possible to locate them for earlier time periods. The distinguishing feature is that these are more or less accurate substitutes for the dates of birth, death, and marriage that we lack. In the second half of the chapter, I will discuss what to do when researching earlier time periods on the frontier or in other places where no exact dates can be found and the researcher must estimate the date needed. We'll focus on what to do when we don't have a date of birth, death, or marriage, and how we can document that the event actually occurred and reasonably estimate when.
    When working with vital records, we must always be concerned about the accuracy of retroactively dated events, whether they be from civil registration, Bible records, tombstones, or stone tablets engraved by Aunt Tillie. Nothing is the gospel truth and these dates can't be stated with absolute certainty. They depend upon both the memory and the recording accuracy of human beings, and thus they are always susceptible to error. The dean of American genealogy, Donald Lines Jacobus, related a story of his professional work and difficulty with a client in an article that originally appeared in
The American Genealogist
. 1 A girl named Anna was born in 1764, some four months after the marriage of her parents. The birth and marriage were recorded in the town records, and the baptisms and marriage were written in the church records. All were in complete harmony.
    However, Mr. Jacobus was hired to trace this ancestry by a “very pious lady” who would be disturbed to find an out-of-wedlock conception on her family tree. In the course of time, the lady noticed the discrepancy between the marriage and birth dates and wrote Jacobus, telling him that he had made an error and that her ancestress Anna was born in 1765. He replied it was not his error and cited his sources. She was not satisfied. She sent him a