A milestone at the archives -

Since we posted the original blog on the archives, some have asked for more details on the kinds of records we are working with.

Last week we finished the death records for the city of Chimbote, Peru, which is located on the coast but part of this province.. Since Huaraz is the capital of the Province of Ancash, the records of many towns and villages are stored here. We have taken 32,509 digital photos in the 7 weeks we have been working on these records since our arrival in Huaraz. There were 113 books, dating from mid 1960 to 1994, in this group. Prior records were already photographed by Juan, our trainer.

This means that there will be over 32,000 additional names of deceased relatives who passed away in Chimbote that will be available for indexing and eventual research on the Internet at FamilySearch.org in about 4 - 5 months. Hopefully, these records will help many people find their deceased ancestors and learn more about them. Most death records list the cause of death, the age of the deceased, the area he/she is from and his/her father and mother.

To date, we have only had 3 photos that we had to retake, which according to Juan is outstanding for a beginning camera crew. All our photos are audited in Salt Lake City from the hard disk that we send up every two weeks. They check for lighting, focus, blurred images, hands and other articles in the photos, etc. We are sure we will have some returned in the future but we feel this is a great start.

We have now started doing the death records of Huaraz. The first book was dated 1891 and we are currently working with 1916. We are excited to finally be doing the records for the city in which we live and serve. These early books are very fragile and it takes us some time to set them up and to photograph each page. Consequently our production has dropped considerably the past week.

We have included some photos of the different shapes and sizes of the books we deal with.

Here is a stack of birth records from a small village that Juan is working on.

Another group of different birth records showing the diversity of sizes and shapes of records.

Here is one of the larger books from Chimbote. Being death records, almost every page had a doctor's certificate indicating the cause of death. It is the small paper attached by glue to the top of the document. Once we shoot the main page, with the doctor's certificate folded up out of the way, we then photograph the certificate with a separate template that shows only the certificate, thus each page requires two takes.

This gives you an idea of the size of this book.

An old book without a cover. There are two death records on each page.

A large and small book. They come in all sizes.

We were fascinated by the fancy signatures from these early records (1901). El Alcalde is the mayor, El Jefe de la Seccion is the Section Chief, Testigo is witness and Declarante is the person who gave the death information to the registrar.

More fancy signatures.

How about these beauties from 1902?

Here are the early books from Huaraz for the years 1891 to 1904.