The Denni Hlasatel (Daily Herald) was a Czech-language newspaper that published in Chicago, Illinois, USA from 1891 to 2006. Through its lifetime, the Denni Hlasatel published death notices for many persons of Czech, Slovak or related ancestry. These death notices are a rich source of genealogical information, and are regularly browsed by individuals researching their family history.

In the mid-1990s, the Czech/Slovak-American Genealogical Society of Illinois (aka CSAGSI) compiled an index of the death notices published in the Denni Hlasatel to that time. This index includes records consisting of the

• name of the deceased, and
• publication date of the death notice.

This project aims to extend the CSAGSI Denni Hlasatel Death Index by:

• displaying names in their "native" form (with diacritical marks)
• displaying equivalent forms of given names (which have been "Americanized" in some cases)
• cross-referencing the death records to other online information sources, such as:
• Cook County, Illinois vital records
• Illinois statewide vital records
• US Social Security death master files
• offering possible alternates (spellings, typically) where likely errors in the original CSAGSI data are detected.

This project views the original death index data to be the property of CSAGSI, and thus the actual data must be purchased from CSAGSI to fully use this project. Not yet implemented, but planned, is a sample set of artificially-generated death index records to be used for testing purposes.

Jim Vlcek

07 March 2014