The original vital records for the town of Branford are found in the Town Clerk’s vault at the Branford Town Hall on the Green.
During the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries some of the vital records were mixed in with the minutes to town meetings. All of the early vital record and land record books have been restored to preserve the pages.
In the latter part of the 19th century, vital records were kept in vital record ledgers and have indexes. Some of the indexes are difficult to correlate to the actual pages. The vital record books may have an index in the book or there may be a separate index, or both.
Starting in 1890 there are birth, marriage and death certificates kept in volumes by year.
Each volume is indexed. Some years have births, marriages and deaths all in one volume, for other years the events are in separate volumes. In the State of Connecticut, birth records are restricted for 100 years.
The Barbour Collection was a Works Project Administration project done in the 1920s and 1930s to collect vital records of almost all Connecticut towns up to 1850. The vital records were recorded on slips and placed in a card catalog at the Connecticut State Library. In addition, an alphabetical listing by surname was done for each town and placed in a bound book. The Branford Town Hall has a copy the Branford bound book. In 2000, Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc. began publishing the alphabetical town Barbour Collection books. The Blackstone Library has a copy of the published Branford Barbour collection.
For one of the Branford vital records volumes, the pages noted by the Barbour Collection does not match the page in the actual volume. It is not known whether the page numbers were altered when the volumes were preserved beginning in the 1960s. Barbour also uses volume 3 as a reference to three different volumes adding to the confusion.
Jane Bouley, Town Historian