You may search this index by name and record type, county, or time span or a combination of any of these search elements. The results will show you the first 200 entries, alphabetically arranged. There are a few ways to search for a name. You can type in a last name. This works well in cases where the name you are looking for is relatively unusual. If you type in "Smith", however, the results could pull up hundreds of names. The results would first show names such as "Coopersmith" or "Arrowsmith Jones" (where "smith" is part of his first name) before you even got to "Arnold Smith". If you know your Smith's first name, type it after Smith with a comma in between such as "Smith, John". If you know that your Smith's first name was either "John" or "Jonathan" you can do a search for "Smith, Jo" which will narrow down the search results and would include Johns as well as Jonathans.

If you know that your Smith lived in Denver from 1890-1900, you can add the time span and the county (Arapahoe at this time) as search elements. A date span will pull up more records so unless you know that your ancestor was only here in a particular year, then use a date span. Also try different spellings. Smith may have been spelled Smyth or Schmidt at one time. If you know that your Smith was in the CCC then you can use the record type as a search element to narrow down the number of Smiths. Check the list of records that we have loaded onto the database to see if there are any special records that you think they might have shown up in.

If you do not know the name (because you don't know a maiden name, or there was a name change, or the name is spelled a lot of different ways) sometimes you can figure it out by narrowing down the search to a type of record, a county or a time span. You may put only a record type, county or time span in the search box but bear in mind that you will only get the first 200 results. You can also put in a county and a time span or any combination of search elements which could narrow it down in cases where you are actually trying to find a name.

Use the records descriptions in order to figure out what records your ancestors may show up in and what information is generally available in the records. Some of these indexes may be more useful to you than others depending on what information may exist in the original record. While most of these records have more information in them than what is on the database, a few may not be worth your while to actually order. Also, because these indexes were compiled from the original records, we cannot be responsible for omissions or errors in the original records.