G2G: Massachusetts Vital Records Project (the tan books) is off line

Question

This morning the ma-vitalrecords.org site is down. Does anyone know anything about this? Is a short term glitch or has it been taken down permanently?

Comments

https://ma-vitalrecords.org/ is giving a 403 error for me at the moment.

It had an earlier issue about 18 April 2023, but apparently recovered. See

https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1569351/whats-with-ma-vitalrecords-org

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Thanks, Jim.

I had checked this earlier but it wasn't working. It's partially working now (some towns are unavailable). Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

I don't know if people like the format of ma-vitalrecords.org, but each of these books is digitized and available at archive.org, HathiTrust.org, and Google Books. Additionally, many books for towns that were never available at ma-vitalrecords.org are available. Examples of digitized tan books:

Scituate
Chelsea
Ipswich

In HathiTrust, do a title search for vital + [town] and you should find what you're looking for immediately. At archive.org just type vital records [town] and you should find what you need quickly. 

Comments

All of them are available here: Massachusetts Sources. Search by town name.

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Wayne

Thanks very much. Very useful! I didn't know about these organized alternatives.

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Also available and searchable for free at AmericanAncestors.org: 

Massachusetts: Vital Records, 1620-1850.

Answer 2

I don't know if it is gone for good but you can still access it through the Wayback Machine.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230408180702/https://ma-vitalrecords.org/

Answer 3

A while back, ma-vitalrecords was down, with a notice posted that the site was for sale.  Since then, I've slowly been replacing all my citations of it with copies from Archive.org or HathiTrust, with the ma-vitalrecords link as an "also available online at" note, since the site did come back.  It's a long and laborious process, but this alert makes me very glad I began it!

Answer 4

I don’t trust ma-vitalrecords.org anymore. Completely blocked now with 404 not found. I’ve used it extensively and would like to replace cites from there with alternate cites. Checked DataDoctors for my Watchlist to start the replacement process, but it doesn’t show any issues with broken links to ma-vitalrecords.org. Should these show up next week, or is this domain not being checked by the WikiTree+ tool?

PS - Haven’t used G2G much. Wanted to retag this response with DataDoctors, but couldn’t figure it out. Feel free to add tags.