Link rates for daughters - a comparison

Recently, we've been working on our annual report. As part of that, we report on the link rates, that is, how successful we are at finding people in the census. For the most part, our link rates are pretty consistent from year to year. There is one group of children, for whom our link rates have increased a lot from 2015 to 2016. This group consists of the daughters that are found in the pension but whose married names are not listed.

The following tables for both Project 1 and Project 2 show what percent of the daughters without married names in the pensions that we were able to link to census or death records during both 2015 and 2016.

Project 1

	1870	1880	1900	1910	1920	1930	1940	Death
2015	91.9	90.8	79.4	71.8	67.6	64.5	56.3	69
2016	90.7	93.7	84.7	77.2	73.7	70.7	62.5	75.6

Project 2

	1870	1880	1900	1910	1920	1930	1940	Death
2015	72.4	87.5	61.4	41.4	26.4	18.7	13.5	26.8
2016	79.6	92.7	70.3	49.5	35.5	28.0	20.1	36.0

For Project 1, our link rates increased by an average of 4.7 percentage points from 2015 to 2016. For Project 2, or link rates increased by an average of 7.9 percentage points from 2015 to 2016.

We attribute this increase not only to the greater availability of marriage records online, but specifically to the fact that all of you are going to Familysearch.org and searching for those marriage records. It is well worth the effort to find those marriage records.

The take away here is, don't forget to use Family Search.