Breaking news… Family Search has added over 50% more Vermont Vital Records images! I dashed onto the Family Search website today to quickly look up a birth record, and saw something I didn’t expect. Two groups of Vermont Vital Records?

If you are not familiar with how to navigate to these records, go to the Family Search homepage. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on United States. Then scroll down to the bottom of the left side of this page and click on Vermont. You’ll see the two groups of vital records images near the bottom of the list.

The first group is titled, Vermont Vital Records, 1760-1954. There are 1,868,775 images, and the notes still say that the collection is not yet complete for records prior to 1871. This database and set of images hasn’t been updated since last January, despite all the stars I have been wishing on. My understanding is that the surnames at the very end of the alphabet have not yet been indexed. I hope that this will be finished up soon.

The new images are titled, Vermont Vital Records, 1760-2003. Whoa. That’s a big time span there. Despite the title, the records seem to be from the 1955-2003 time span. There are 1,162,117 images in this group. There is no searchable index yet, but there are indexes available if you browse the images. Some of the images are arranged alphabetically. In addition to the usual birth, marriage and death records, there are also divorce records and amended and delayed registrations of vital records. The newest records, from 1980-2003, have a note at the top that the images are courtesy of Ancestry.com.

I’m fortunate to live and research in an open records state. And now we are all fortunate to be able to research more Vermont ancestors any day or time, even in our jammies and bunny slippers. Thank you Family Search! Now about the rest of that searchable index for the earliest Vermont Vitals….