Wordless Wednesday: On Living and Dying in Old Pittsburgh Area

Two years and folks are still dying to get in the index!

My favorite brainchild genealogy project recently celebrated its 2nd anniversary as the volunteers from our Allegheny County Rootsweb mail list are still feverishly working to index the deaths, marriages and divorces from old Pittsburgh area newspapers.  I've wondered just how many bottles of Visine we have purchased since then?

The wonderful volunteers deserve a huge pat on the back as over 85,000 death entries and over 24,000 marriages have been indexed and placed online for all to dig through.

During the last two years, our adventures have expanded to include a World War I military personnel index which has over 73,000 entries.  Also added was a great 1893 article on the boys of Co. E from the "Recent Unpleasantness" that some of my readers might call the Civil War. 

In addition, we've added a number of articles on World War I which provide an everyday look in to the lives of wartime Pittsburgh men and women as they served overseas during the 1918-1919 timeframe.

And just to really make you fall on your knees and pray for those children who were sent to the House of Refuge which later became Morganza, we've been searching for articles on the institution and for as many names as we can locate and placing it online.  Some of the tales are just so heart wrenching. 

Check out all we've done here:  http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~paallent/index.html

You can also find the indexes here:  http://www.usgwarchives.net/pa/allegheny/death-index.htm
Note while the date of last update reflected on the main index page is November 2011, the individual updates were last completed in mid February 2012. 

Ahh, genealogy.  What great volunteers there are to make old news "new" for us and to render genealogy buffs "wordless" in appreciation.

©2012 AS Eldredge