"The State of Maryland did not require the registration of birth and death records until 1898. Thus, these vital sources for research are missing." Mr. Ridenour created two volumes to help fill this void in Washington County, Maryland source records. The first volume covers the years 1790-1943; this volume covers 1944-2001. He spent hundreds of hours at the microfilm reader searching through thousands of issues of Hagerstown newspapers and presented the information to the Washington County Free Library in the form of loose leaf notebooks for public use. The Friends of the Western Maryland Room funded the production of all of the accumulated information into two volumes. In both, he includes a guide to using the obituary locator including abbreviations for age, newspapers and veterans. The volumes are presented in alphabetical order which makes it easy to locate individual names. The entries include the name of the individual, age (when known); date the obituary appeared in the newspaper, the name of the newspaper and whether the individual was a veteran and in which war.
C. William Ridenour
2005, CD, Searchable, Adobe Acrobat, PC and Mac, 684 pp.
ISBN: 9780788435058
101-CD3505
