“Using Coroner’s Records,” by Mary Penner from 24/7 Family History Circle on Ancestry.com offers some great tips for working with Coroner Records, a historical reference I never thought about before:
If your ancestor had an untimely end, check for details in the local coroner’s records. Dating back some 900 years, the coroner’s system traces its beginnings to medieval England. Death was serious business in merry old England. Strict and complex rules governed death, its circumstances, and the handling of corpses. The coroner imposed hefty fines on community residents who side-stepped the rules regarding dead persons.
It was particularly bothersome when strangers to a community turned up dead in their midst. The responsibilities and potential financial consequences for those who discovered stray dead people could be so great that villagers sometimes dragged a dead body to a nearby village and left the unfortunate soul on someone else’s doorstep.
The coroner’s position evolved over the years from fine collector to its current primary responsibility, which is investigating suspicious, violent, sudden, or unattended deaths.
Article Information
Using Coroner Records in Your Family History Research is Issue Number 297 published February 12, 2007, by Lorelle VanFossen. This is just one of many articles found in the Genealogy Techniques categories. Lorelle VanFossen writes for a variety of blogs, websites, ezines, and print publications. She also teaches and does a lot of public speaking internationally on photography, writing, blogging, web page design and development, and more. She and her husband and cat(s) travel full-time across North American and the rest of the world by RV, planes, trains, automobiles, and foot, writing and photographing their travels and nature, when they can find it. Lorelle VanFossen has written 231 articles for our our family history blog.
Related Articles
Using feeds, you can monitor this entire blog through our RSS Feed, or the categories associated with this post:
Genealogy Techniques. If you would like to monitor the comments on this post, subscribe with the RSS comments feed.
This site is for educational and research purposes only. We permit the use of the material for not-for-profit purposes. When citing any of the material published on this site, you must provide proper credit to the site and a link back to http://www.cameraontheroad.com/family. All other use must be approved in writing. For more information on our policies, permissions, and copyrights, see our About page. All Rights Reserved and Copyrighted.
