Ohio, 1790s-1870s Vital Records #1

This data set contains page images from the two-volume book Gateway to the West. Ruth Bowers and Anita Short compiled this book from over 350 articles that originally appeared in the Gateway to the West periodical, published in Ohio from 1967 to 1978.

The Gateway to the West periodical offered a wide variety of important genealogical source materials, many of which would have otherwise been difficult for the average individual to access. Those materials included marriage records, indexes to estates, will abstracts, death, cemetery, and divorce records, indenture and apprenticeship records, baptisms, land grants, ministers' licenses, minutebooks of courts, deed abstracts, partition records, guardianships, and naturalization records. The majority of these materials cover the years 1800 to 1850 and are from seventy-six of Ohio's eighty-eight counties.

Combined, these articles reference the names of more than 93,000 individuals. What you can learn about each listed individual varies, depending on the article. Invariably, the information will help you locate a particular individual at a specific place and point in time. Learning a location, and date from these records may help you find your ancestor in other genealogical records not necessarily included in this collection. In some cases, particularly when your ancestor's name appears in a marriage record, will, or deed, you will also be able to establish family relationships.

Also note that if you do find one of your ancestors among these records, it is likely that you will find a connection to a family line from the thirteen original colonies. This is because the Ohio area was one of the first to be settled north of the Mason-Dixon line and west of the thirteen original colonies. With the added convenience of a name index spanning both volumes, Gateway to the West makes an excellent addition to any Ohio researcher's library.

These books were provided to Genealogy.com by the Genealogical Publishing Company of Baltimore, Maryland.

How to Make Best Use of this Data Set

Before using this data set, you should be aware of the following:

As you search this data set's index, you may occasionally see that some of the names contain question marks, as in "Williamson, ???". These question marks indicate that a name was unknown or difficult to transcribe from the original.