Elizabeth’s Journal

Reason for Collecting Vital Statistics

I am doing some reading on why and when governments began collecting vital statistics on their citizens, and I would not have guessed the driving force. According to Val D. Greenwood in Researching American Genealogy, the original impetus for state or national registration of births, deaths, and marriages was to protect property rights—but this wasn’t very effective, especially in the ever-growing American territories. It was actually “medical men and statisticians” who provided the reason necessary to set up and enforce accurate registrations—without that basic information about the population it was responsible for, the government could not really know how bad a cholera or plague epidemic was. Lovely thought, isn’t it?

I also found out that the reason nothing is kept on a national level here is, of course, the Constitution. All powers not granted expressly to the federal goverment are reserved to the States—and in 1787, Mr. Greenwood points out, no one saw the need for vital registrations. This means for us family historians that one must check on a state-by-state, county-by-county basis for people, which is sometimes very reminiscent of looking for a needle in a haystack. In Ohio, which is where most of my dad’s side of the family is from, deaths were not recorded until 1867, and then only at the county level; state-level registrations don’t begin until 1908.