Genealogists who do research online now have a new tool to help them search census mortality schedules. The website MortalitySchedules.com is an offering that GenealogyBuff.com announced this week.

The new tool helps researchers find census mortality schedules which have been transcribed and posted across the web. MortalitySchedules.com is a directory of these schedules which provides a search function to find surnames for genealogy research.

Federal Census Mortality Schedules were taken during census years 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880. These schedules list deaths which occurred in each enumeration district for the previous year.

A valuable resource for genealogy studies, mortality schedules contain information that, in many cases, give the only record of an ancestor’s death. The census enumerators were instructed to give great care and obtain accurate information, especially for these mortality schedules.

Bill Cribbs, the owner and webmaster for both GenealogyBuff.com and MortalitySchedules.com, spent many days combing cyberspace, to find transcriptions of these records. Most of these online transcriptions were made by individuals who volunteer their time and effort freely. A volunteer will normally transcribe an individual county or, in most cases, one census year for that county. Thousands of transcriptions are located on a multitude of servers across the web.

“I compiled a directory of every schedule that I could locate. There are still more to be found and they are being added to MortalitySchedules.com as they are discovered,” stated Cribbs.

MortalitySchedules.com is free to use and is made possible by the promotion of Ancestry.com and links to Rootsweb.com.