Albeit, handwriting isn't always easy to read

Our journey begins on a rainy October morning at the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center in Jackson. The usual road noise is absent because Highway 61 is closed for construction in front of the building. Two new volunteers are working on a project to create an updated finding aid for the county's inquests, pre-1940. Most of these are handwritten, and years ago they were placed into folders and given a numbering system. Volunteers are now verifying all of that information so they can fill out a spreadsheet. Good times.

One of my favorite job perks is getting called on to help puzzle out a mystery. Such is the case here, with a folder marked Albert, N.S. The inquest's handwriting was tricky to read, having been written with a thin-ink pen. So splotchy!

Did I know what these two particular words were? No, no I did not, but those words were in the narrative, not the cause of death, so I immediately focused on the larger issue: the decedent's name. I wasn't so sure it was Albert. It could have been Albiet, or Albrit, or maybe another possibility I couldn't figure out. I was confident about the ALB at the beginning, at least.

So it was off to the Missouri Secretary of State's digital collection of death certificates.

I recommend this resource for anyone who had an ancestor who died in Missouri from 1910 to the early 1970s. Death certificates became mandatory in Missouri in 1910 and are not an open record for 50 years, so each year, a team of volunteers scans and transcribes all of the death certificates from the most recent available year. I helped transcribe these death certificates this year, and it was a fascinating process. Fortunately, by the early 1970s, most counties were using typewriters to fill out death certificates. This was not necessarily the case in 1929, as it turns out.

I couldn't find a death certificate for Albert, N., from Cape Girardeau County from 1929. So I shifted tactics and searched by date, which I had as Oct. 12, 1929. There! Under Albiet, Walter, same cause of death, with a date of death two days earlier. (I had the date of the inquest, not of death.) His death certificate listed his occupation as Merchant, so I went to the city directory from 1910 that we have on the shelf at the Archive. There indeed, Walter Albert, 508 Themis St. in Cape Girardeau, owner of S. Albert Grocer Co. I then checked the cause of death from the inquest against the cause of death from the death certificate, and they were identical. Chronic endo-myocarditis. I couldn't clearly read that on the inquest or the death certificate, but the code on the death certificate, 93C, corresponds to that description. (There's a list of codes online.) Further, his parents listed on the death certificate were Sebastian and Rosa Albert, who, according to a Southeast Missourian blog post, had been owners of the grocery store previously.

So I sent an email to the Digital Heritage team suggesting a correction to the record's transcription (they accepted), we updated the folder so it now reads Albert, W.S., and now we have records that will be much easier for future researchers to access.

More history on the Albert family from the Southeast Missourian:

semissourian.com/blogs/flynch/entry/54223