Virginia Vital Records on Ancestry

For those of you who follow Dick Eastman’s Newsletter, you noticed his 5 June issue had a blurb about the availability of Virginia Vital Records on Ancestry. Eastman’s announcement reads:

“Governor Terry McAuliffe recently announced the completion of a two-year, public-private collaboration between the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) and Ancestry.com that fully digitizes the state’s vital records. To date, more than 16 million records have been digitized and indexed. Scanned images of the original, public^* documents are available online through Ancestry.com. Access to the indexed information on the records is available free of charge through VDH’s Division of Vital Records’ and the Library of Virginia’s websites. So far, birth and death records from 1912 to the present, marriage records from 1936 to the present and divorce records from 1918 to the present have been scanned and are available. Images are available and the records have also been indexed.”

Read carefully.  When you access these records through the VirginiaDepartment of Health or the Library of Virginia, you are immediately sent to Ancestry. The index is free, giving names and dates, but to see the scanned image, in which there is a wealth of information, you have to have an ancestry subscription. Bummer!

Since we have an Ancestry subscription, we were able to access the scanned documents. They are clear, and it was very exciting to see marriage licenses we had processed for Fredericksburg Circuit Court now online!!