I Suppose It's Better Than 'Butter'

Nancy Bovy spotted this little girl in the Missouri Death Certificates.

A little research turns up an Oleomargarine Fristoe, born in 1922, who married in Jackson County, Missouri, in 1965.

Why did Missourians around 1920 name kids after fake butter? Maybe because oleomargarine was for many years an illicit substance, but started to gain wide popular acceptance during and after World War I. Missouri seems to have been the first state to ban margarine, in 1881. A later statute prohibited the manufacture or sale of any substance "in imitation or semblance of natural butter," or which "resemble[d] yellow or any shade of genuine yellow butter." Other states went so far as to require that margarine be colored bright pink, so that consumers would not mistakenly think it was edible. My mother, born in 1944, remembers adding yellow coloring to white margarine when she was a girl. Only after Congress passed the Margarine Act of 1950 were companies allowed to sell the yellow sticks of oleo we know and love today.

Georgia On My Mind

Renee reports some very, very good news:

FamilySearch and the Georgia Archives announced today that Georgia’s death index from 1919 to 1927 can be accessed for free online. The online index is linked to digital images of the original death certificates. This free database will open doors to additional information for family historians and genealogists with Georgia ties. The index and images can be searched and viewed at www.GeorgiaArchives.org (Virtual Vault link) or labs.familysearch.org.

She Didn't Look a Day Over 1.5 Million

According to her death certificate, a woman in Malaysia was 1,996,964 years old when she died in 1998.

An entry for the Guinness Book? Not quite.

The Ipoh woman was actually 39 at the time of her death, but a 'technical error' resulted in the entry on her certificate, reported Malaysian daily China Press. [Link]

Bad Students Get Born Again

Parents of 100 children in Vietnam asked for and received bogus death certificates for their kids, and then applied for new birth certificates to make them appear younger.

The fact of the matter is that most of these children are bad students who repeatedly fail to get promotion to the next higher grade. [Commune head Nguyen Duy] Bon said, to avoid classmates’ taunts and other problems, people had used to ask the authorities to lower their children’s ages but the paperwork was cumbersome. [Link]

Decipher Yourself

If you'd like to test your transcribing skills, head over to the Decipher mailing list archives. Almost all of the messages are from KYGenWeb volunteers working on the Kentucky Vital Records Project, which has digitized and indexed more than 126,000 death certificates so far.

I've transcribed tens of thousands of handwritten names over the years, but I still get stumped. The trick is knowing when you should consider yourself stumped, and knowing how to find a "backdoor" solution. I'm glad to see that some respondents on the Decipher list are going beyond the digitized document to confirm their hunches with census and other records.

I'll admit, it's also fun to read the conflicting answers they sometimes give.

Looks like Ase

Joe or Ace

I think it looks like Gee, possibly short for George.

I think it's Lee with an "overly fancy" L.

Maybe the Province Should Deliver Pizza

Ontario has extended its 15-business-day money-back guarantee on birth certificates to marriage and death certificates ordered online.

Government Services Minister Gerry Phillips said his ministry has had to issue only 121 refunds for 315,000 online birth certificate applications since the program began just over a year ago.

"Pizza Pizza would drool over these kinds of service levels," Phillips said, referring to the pizza chain's famous 40-minutes-or-free guarantee. [Link]

A Vital Source of Novel Ideas

Writing novels and short stories is Steve Whisnant's night job. He gets some of his ideas from his day job, as field representative for the Vital Records Division of the Arkansas Department of Health.

“The death certificate is one of the last documents of the living, so we want to make sure it’s filed properly,” he says. “We do queries if something on a death certificate looks wrong.”

In his story “Hospicetality,” a deputy sheriff suspects something odd about an old man’s death, but his only evidence — the body — has been cremated. In “Certificate of Death,” as the author tells it, “somebody is looking at death certificates, and they come across their own death.” The idea might be scarier if he didn’t describe it so good-naturedly. “I enjoy my day job,” Whisnant says. [Link]

A Vacation to Die For

Looking forward to an eight-day cruise to Mexico next month, Jim Hickson ordered a copy of his birth certificate from Los Angeles County, California. Imagine his surprise when he received his death certificate instead.

"I was depressed at first," he said. "I thought, God, maybe it's an omen."

He even begged a reporter: "Don't put me in the obituary column, please."

Although he didn't stay sad for long. As friends and family members repeatedly poked fun at his botched birth certificate, Hickson took an odd delight in being assumed dead.

Family friend Patrick Henry walked into his living room last week and delivered the same line used by a few of his sons: "Hey, dead man walking," Henry boomed, "What's up?"

Hickson said he even joked to a court clerk, "I should have gotten money back," considering death certificates only cost $12, while copies of birth records go for $17 apiece. [Link]

Cure for Old Age Discovered in 1951

Among the "20 Things You Didn't Know About... Death" in the current issue of Discover were these two things I didn't know about death.

3 No American has died of old age since 1951.

4 That was the year the government eliminated that classification on death certificates. [Link]

A more complete explanation may be found in Leonard Hayflick's 2002 essay titled, "Has Anyone Ever Died of Old Age?"

The cure resulted from a Public Health Conference on Records and Statistics in which all state and federal agencies were ordered to adopt a standard list of 130 contributing and underlying causes of death. In 1951, the list deleted a cause of death attributed to “old age.”

Thus, with a single stroke of a typewriter key, old age was cured as a cause of death in this country. [Link (pdf)]