Talk:Massachusetts Vital Records

The registry of Vital records in Boston holds vital records for Massachusetts from 1920 to the present. The records are now available for births, online inside the registry for the first time. The years covered are 1953-1986 and do not include marriage or death records. There is not remote access at this time.

This service improvement should held researchers work more efficiently in the often crowded and under serviced research room. The new access to the records eliminates the limitation on viewing these records by waiting for a “call for slips” after obtaining a volume and page number from an index in open stacks. All of the records are in closed stacks at present. The registry charges a step fee of nine dollars per hour to access vital records in the research room and has cut down on their research hours in recent years.

The Vital Records has future plans to expand access. In a tour of the Vital Records Registry in 2009, the registry indicated that the goal is to have the records viewable at town halls throughout the state.