Off to Rolling Meadows today...keep your fingers crossed for me

Hey all, I'm heading out to the Cook County Clerk satellite office in Rolling Meadows, IL today. I'm going to try to beat the system by going to request Julius Bolda's death certificate in person rather than sending in the request via snail mail. Cook County, like so many other county clerk's offices around the country, tends to have a pretty long turnaround time for records. Fortunately, they have more than one office. Though the main clerk's office is in downtown Chicago, not the easiest place in the world for me to access, there are also suburban offices in the North, Northwest, and in the South so no matter where in Chicagoland you are, there should be a clerk's office somewhat close to you. Rolling Meadows is the Northwest office and while it is definitely more accessible to me, it's still a good 35-40 minutes or so away. But, if they have the records there you can avoid the turnaround time of the snail mail method. The hitch here though is that the satellite offices do not have ALL of the records available to them. The last time I went down there I had a list of about four people for whom I needed death certificates and I was able to get all but one of them. The other one is only available from the downtown location. I'm hoping that won't be the case for Julius.

For those who need vital records from the Clerk's Office, Cook County offers one other option. www.cookcountygenealogy.com is the clerk's office genealogy portal site. From that address you can check for the record you need online and if it is available you can download it directly onto your computer. Millions of records have been uploaded to the site, but not all of them are currently available. Out of all of the records that I've ordered from Cook County, I think only about three or four were available for download through that site. So it is still a work in progress but it's worth a shot, especially if you do not live locally and can't access the satellite offices.

So keep me in your genealogical thoughts today guys, I need some good luck to get this record today! :)