Hamilton County, Ohio

Book excerpt: This new index has been compiled from the death and burial records of twenty-four churches in Hamilton County, Ohio. It contains nearly 11,000 deaths recorded in the death and burial registers of individual priests and ministers before 1850. Although index entries vary considerably in detail from church to church and year to year, a particular entry may contain any of the following valuable information: full name and maiden name (where applicable) of the deceased, names of parents, surviving spouse, date of death, age at time of death and date of burial. Entries are alphabetized by surname and are coded with a letter or letters corresponding to a key of churches, allowing researchers to consult the original records for clarification; an "*" preceding the church code denotes an original record containing birth information for the deceased. An alphabetical listing of maiden names and corresponding married names follows the index. Hamilton County, Ohio, Church Death Records, 1811-1849 is intended to supplement the cemetery extractions published in the Hamilton County Burial Records series (also published by Heritage Books, Inc.). Although these church registers do not provide a complete record of Hamilton County deaths and burials for this time period, they can be used to fill in gaps in the official record and suggest new avenues for genealogical research. This volume is particularly valuable for family researchers whose ancestors may have passed through Hamilton County during the western migration but were not residents. The deaths of transient pioneer families are often unaccounted for in county court and cemetery records and were seldom noted in the obituaries of Cincinnati's newspapers; in some cases church registers are the only record of the deaths of these individuals.