There are many sites online that have information on how to find vital records. Most of them take you in circles and you never really find what you are looking for. This article should help with finding birth, marriage and death records.

Let's start with this page that has most of the links for where to find information about State and County birth, marriage and death records from around the USA - FreePRF.com's vital records page.

If you are trying to find the birth date of the person you are researching, I suggest trying this site that has a free birth date lookup - BirthDatabase.com. BirthDatabase.com is a pretty good resource of finding the exact year, month and day of a person's birth. The best part is that it's FREE. The only fallback with this site is that you can't narrow your search by state. The search results cover the entire USA for all the persons with the name you area looking up. Some names are omitted from this database.

RootsWeb.com has a very good death index. You can search by first, middle and last name. You can also search by social security number.

For birth information, Ancestry.com is another good resource. It also has a death information database.

Marriage records are tricky, especially if you want information from California. Most recent marriage records in California are confidential. You can obtain some information from www.vitalsearch-ca.com/gen/ca/_vitals/camarrin.htm; however, the records only go up to 1986.

Also try www.vitalsearch-ca.com/gen/tx/tx_/txmarrim-go.htmfor their Texas marriage database. Their Texas marriages database is comprised of over 6 million groom/bride entries from 1967-2002 displayed in straight text form. In addition they have a Kentucky marriage database - www.vitalsearch-ca.com/gen/ky/_vitals/kymarrim-go.htm - from 1973-2002.

Clark County Nevada (Las Vegas) www.co.clark.nv.us/recorder/mar_srch.htm - has a great marriage records database. Marriages are indexed on-line from 1984 through the present. This marriage inquiry system is also FREE to use.

If you cannot find the vital records information online, try The National Center For Health Statistics page on "Where to Write For Vital Records," www.cdc.gov/nchs/howto/w2w/w2welcom.htm. It lists the mailing addresses, phone numbers of all the states vital records offices and how to obtain such records.

Jay Rosenzweig is the owner of California Investigation Services. He has located thousands of people over the past 25 years. He is also a past president of the California Association of Licensed Investigators.