The Importance of Vital Records in Today's Society

Abstract

RECENT issue of a popular national magazine (1) described what is to date probably one of the most dramatic uses of marriage and death records. Entitled A Most Valuable Accident, it is the story of the people who swallowed varying amounts of radium during World War I and on into the thirties. Most of them were the girls who painted the radium figures on watch dials. They found that their work went faster and more accurately if they licked their paint brushes to a point. number of them died in the early nineteen twenties. Others have died since, but many are still alive. The Atomic Energy Commission, as a part of its program of collecting all available information about the effect of radioactivity on human beings, is searching systematically for the survivors. The research team provided by the New Jersey State Department of Health, together with a detective from the State police are, in essence, conducting a missing persons search to track down and study the dial painters. To trace them, all available records are used. Marriage records are reviewed by the clerks of the vital statistics office in an effort to learn the present names of some of the girls. Death certificates are checked, not only to preclude vain hunts but also to learn presumed causes of death. This is a logical and practical use of vital records. Most people take vital records for granted; assume we have always had them and, without much effort, will continue to have them available when we need them. The real story is quite different. It has taken more than 300 years to build our registration system. Even today some vital events escape the registration network. For example, 11 areas have no centrally filed marriage records and 16 areas, no divorce records. Looking backward, perhaps it is fortunate that our early settlers, predominantly English, were accustomed to the registration of christenings, marriages, and burials. This custom, no doubt, had its part in influencing the Grand Assembly of Virginia in 1632 to require ministers or wardens from every parish to provide at court on June 1 each year a register of christenings, marriages, and burials (2). These were the traditional events conducted by the church, but, in effect, they provided an account of births, marriages, and deaths. In the beginning, the records were primarily for the protection of individual rights, especially those rights relating to the distribution of property. The emphasis on vital records as legal documents to protect both the individual and the community was first reflected in the 1639 law of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The law departed from past practice by requiring government officers rather than the clergy to record births, deaths, and marriages (3), and formed the pattern for the laws adopted by Connecticut and New Plymouth, and, eventually, other colonies. None of the early laws was particularly effec-