Why you should check the source file

You might find more members of this family, under surname variations that are much easier to spot on a small file than on this large website.

The details shown on this site are only there to help you determine if it’s the same Giuseppe O’Reilly as the one on your family tree.

There may be more details on the source file (born alive or stillborn, occupation, etc.).

There are notes about the difficulty of transcribing the records.

This site might have bad information due to a programming error. Some data are tidier than other data, and a datum could have been captured under the wrong string variable.

The webmaster has seen the use of ditto marks for place of birth on census transcriptions. That is what the census taker wrote and so that is what the transcriber copied. Obviously, you will need to check the source file to see what the birthplace is.

But I’m in the archives and I’m trying to save time.
The source file might have the volume and page number.

Hint for using USGenWeb files: Check the URL. Work backwards and check the parent directory. If you are looking at a marriage record, you might find other categories of records, such as census, obituary, and church records not indexed here. Many records will never be added because they are in paragraph form and indexing them would be labor intensive.

While this index might provide clues, it would be inexcusably sloppy to add anything from this index to your family tree without checking it first. The transcription projects are not original source material either, but they provide clues.

About the ABT dates: These are determined by subtracting whole years only. However many years old, subtract that from the year of the event and that’s the ABT year. Months are not considered, except when the person is under 1 year old and then the age is changed to 1 year.