www.itowler.com

About a week ago, I was surfing the Internet, looking at some Indiana Genealogy sites. Indiana, along with Kentucky, and Virginia are areas that I have done the most research in. Looking at my family tree, my previous 4-5 generations all have solid roots in Indiana, on both my Mothers side and my Fathers side. While surfing I somehow managed to find my way to the Indiana State Library webpage. I have been to the site before, and I have had a little bit of success, but not a tremendous amount. I generally have a little better luck at the Individual County or City Library pages. This time while making my way through the Indiana State Library page, I found a new resource named VINE, that should be helpful. VINE stands for Vital Information Exchange, and appears that the intent is to make a single point to search for multiple types of records. The VINE project overview page states:

The Vital Information Exchange, (VINE), is a collaborative state wide database that is composed of Indiana local history and vital records from Indiana libraries, historical societies, genealogy societies, and related organizations. The database is designed to allow participants and users to obtain access to Indiana local history and vital records through an Internet searchable database. Since the VINE is Web-based, no additional software needs to be downloaded or installed. The database is searchable by county, event, or through a general surname search of all records. These records are available to the public at no charge and include a host of records such as: birth, marriage, death, divorce, obituaries, court records,newspapers, scrapbooks, yearbooks, church records, military records, and many other record types.

The VINE site allows you to enter a Name, either Full or partial, and then using a Drop down menu, you choose a Record type. Currently the Record types you can select from include : Anniversary, Biography, Birth, Cemetery, Census, Church Records, Death, Divorce, Marriage, Military, Mortality, Naturalization, Obituary, and School/Yearbook. At first I was pretty excited about finding this resource, but it does appear that the search function/records indexing is in its infancy. I was not able to find any records other than Obituary’s for the Surnames Towler and Arbuckle. In all fairness, the site does issue a statement at the bottom of the page that it is still under development, and that not all features are fully functional.

So even though the VINE site is not fully functional, it was able to help me find 13 Obituary’s that I was interested in. The 13 included 11 Towler obituaries and 2 Hoffman obituaries. The VINE site does not give you an image of the record or even a transcription, but it does give you the details about which library in the Indiana State system has the record, what the source of the record is, and the date. Using this I was able to determine that the Greensburg Library in Decatur County, Indiana, had several obituaries that I was interested in.

Using the information that I had found in VINE I was able to give a researcher local to Greensburg, a list of exact Papers, dates and names, so that they could lookup the Obituaries and print off a copy for me. I am sure that this saved me money, and saved the researcher time.

All in all VINE has been helpful for me so far, but I do look forward to its further development. I have high hopes that it will be come a powerful tool for use in finding Indiana Genealogy records.

You can find the VINE website here :

http://208.119.72.68/vine/

Ian