Extreme damage to index of Massachusetts vital records

John Chandler_1

Large numbers of entries of Massachusetts vital records that were formerly in the index have disappeared. For example, Alan E. Hovey, born in Southbridge, Mass, on Sept 4, 1909, is no longer in the index. I can still find the image on-line by going to the collection "Massachusetts Births, 1841-1915" and browsing to image 99 of film 4000679, but the film viewer now says "no indexes available" for that image and, indeed, for the entire film. The same is true for film 4002286 and, presumably, many others.