Prepared by Elisabeth Lindsay.
Death, birth, and marriage indexes play an important role in genealogy. Access to indexes help researchers locate ancestors or other family members in far distant places and may confirm an event took place. Indexes may also help to confirm the name, date, and place of an event. As noted, however, indexes can be wrong, and ideally should be used to guide the researcher to the original record. Indexes may also contain omissions; that is, records may be missing from an index that actually do exist. In some cases, multiple versions or editions of an index are available and information may exist in one that is not available in another. Local libraries and archives often house death indexes for their state and local area. Many death indexes are available on the Internet on various genealogy web sites, with or without a fee.