The Massachusetts Vital Records Project, at present, has two indices: Town & Surname. A third, Family, should be available by the end of 2010. The indices are found by links on the project's home page.

Chronlogically sorted records

All names within a surname are sorted on date. Hopefully, this will make searching through the larger surnames a bit easier. There is a small graphic, , that provides a link to the image of the page where that record is found. All towns will eventually be done this way making a very consistent look.

Over the years there have been updates made to the formatting of the transcriptions. Some of these updates did not get applied across all towns. Consequently, there are basically four different formats. A complete revision of the formatting will be undertaken during 2010 and all towns will be updated.

The way that images are displayed is also getting an update. Previously, clicking the link simply displayed the image. Different browsers handle this differently. IE will load the page and then shrink it so that the entire image will display in the browser window. Clicking the image caused it to display full size. The new display will center the image and all will display at the same size. There are also three navigation buttons at the top and bottom: Previous, Back & Next. The Previous and Next links will display the next sequential page. The Back button uses your browser's history. So, if you start on page 9 and click Next, Next, Next, Previous, Next, you will see pages 10, 11, 12, 11, and 12. It will take six clicks of the Back button to return to page 9.


MA VRs Project
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The Massachusetts Vital Records Project

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