“Fourteen Years of Exploring Pandemic Influenza Death Certificates with Microfilm Heros and Ancestry Avatars”

Timothy Cuff, Westminster College

This paper will discuss a fifteen year project to collect and analyze death certificate data for the years of and the years surrounding the Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19. Data has been collected and analyzed for two counties, Mahoning County, Ohio (Youngstown) and Lawrence County, Pennsylvania (New Castle). The paper will compare the results of the analysis in these two adjacent counties separated by a state border as well as the value and difficulty of using death certificates as primary sources with undergraduate students.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 68. The Politics of Data