ANCESTRY.COM'S NEW MASS. VITAL RECORDS INDEXES: FINDING THE DEATH DATE OF MY GREAT GRANDMOTHER

Earlier today Randy Seaver posted "20th Century Massachusetts Vital Record Indexes New on Ancestry.com" on his Genea-Musings blog. After reading it, I went over to Ancestry to give them a try. I had never found a record of the death my maternal great grandmother Pauline (Offlinger)White, so decided to try a search for that.

I went to the search box for "Massachusetts, Death Index, 1901-1980" and entered
Pauline White's name. I know she'd been alive in the 1950's so for a year I entered
1960 and set a search parameter of + or - 20 years. I wasn't sure what town she had
died in, so I left it blank. I entered her maiden name, Offinger, as a keyword. This
is what the screen looked like before I hit the "Search" button:

What came up were these search results:

Only the first five were women named Pauline White.I started with the first name,
with a death date of 1957 in the city of Brockton. I clicked  "View Record" and this was
what I saw:

So, this told me that this Pauline White's death record was on page 473 in volume 34
in the Mass.Vital Records Books. But, was it MY Pauline White?. I clicked on the image
of the record in the upper right hand corner and saw this:

And there it was! Pauline White, with (Offinger) beside her name! It wasn't the first
name on the search results, but the second, who'd died in Boston in 1959. Her death
record can be found in volume 30, page 130. My great grandmother had survived my
great grandfather for twenty years after his death in 1939.

This will be a great help in filling in some blanks on that side of my family!