The following forms were in standard use by the Office of the Coroner:

Form 2 -- Affidavit

Form 12 -- Inquisition Verdict form (rarely used) 

Form 13 -- Coroner's Jury Verdict

Form 17 -- Request to Coroner to hold an inquest from a hospital

Form 24 Coroner -- Proof of Identity

Form 25 -- Press Report

Form 31 -- Testimony Before Coroner and Jury

Form 169 -- Notarized Affidavit

G-11-51 -- Description of Occurrence 

The following observations detail how files were kept by the Coroner and how modern day interns are experiencing the changes in file keeping, documentation, and order.

Having moved on to the files from the first few years of the twentieth century, I have begun to question the coroner's office decision to rubber band the individual files in the boxes. The rubber banding doesn't seem necessary given that the tri-folded nature of the reports themselves must have kept them separated from one another originally. The rubber bands have corroded in their old age, and either flake apart into tiny black shards when a record is opened or stick to other reports and tear the covers. This has considerably slowed my progress in sorting the files, especially when compared to the records from the 1960s (neatly organized into separate, though wasteful, envelopes). It is certainly a frustration.

The 1900s files can be harder to work with because of the aforementioned reasons, but as we get into 1904 and 1905 the files are becoming increasingly easier to work with. The files do not fall apart as much when unfolding them and the rubber bands are less likely to stick to other files. One thing that has remained constant, however, is the filing technique the coroners used. The files may have been started in one month, but will not have been finished for a few months. This causes the files to be in numerical order but date wise they are all over the place. This is frustrating because when re-filing the reports it is harder to keep them in order.

Coroner's inquests appear to occur only when the death is particularly grizzly or industrial in nature. If it is a murder-suicide an inquest is ordered. If someone fell to the bottom of a pit of acid at a mill an inquest is ordered. My initial sense of this was that it was largely voyeuristic--that the coroner's office would request one only to get all the grim and unfortunate details. Now I believe the inquests may have been motivated by insurance or liability reasons, because they usually occur when the decedent or the perpetrator of the death was in some way affiliated with an industry or company.

The current box I am working on is from 1906. I thought, as I worked my way through the years, that the boxes would become more organized and easier to work with. At first this assumption was true; the current box I am working on, however, is the most disorganized and hard to work with so far. As I began going through the box to make sure it was in order I found that it was all over the place with records starting at 100 and going to 180 but then jumping to 1 and going from there up to 200. But I have a few files in the 300 to 400 range that do not even appear to belong in that particular box.

Working with the files themselves is also challenging. The rubber bands have made the files stick to one another, which is much worse in this current box than in previous years. I have to spend more time working them apart so the files do not ripe. Perhaps this box was exposed to more moisture than the others, causing the rubber bands to stick more readily to the paper. Or perhaps a different type of rubber band may have been used.

One box from 1970 was much more challenging than the rest of the previous boxes because it was completely disorganized. There were only a few folders in the box, all of which were stuffed far past capacity.  Several folders were labeled as "Fetal Deaths & Still Borns" which probably contained between 400-500 records organized in no visible or logical manner. The other folders contained natural deaths, mostly heart-related, also in no order, separated only by month and year.