Genealogy

When reading family histories, as I often find myself doing in the Milstein Division, I frequently come across glowing depictions of people’s ancestors, of the grandmother who made the best peach cobbler this side of the Mississippi, or the aunt who was adored by all the neighborhood children and stray cats. For obvious reasons, less favorable descriptions of one’s family are not as common. Rarely do we come across stories of the egotistical great-grandfather or the lay-about uncle. Even rarer are those condemnations of whole branches of one’s family tree, as if one’s family passed down undesirable habits and traits generation after generation. Yet these are exactly the judgments that are transcribed in the research notes, or ‘Family Trait Files’, that were compiled for the Eugenics Records Office during the early decades of the last century.

Many months ago, I posted a piece about the valuable, but underused, collection of genealogical material in our division known as the Family Files. Among the myriad research notes, family newsletters, photographs, and miscellaneous material are a small number of files compiled by genealogists for submission to the Eugenics Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. It is in these files that, alongside notes on mother’s exceptional musical talent, we find accounts of the uncultivated, the “general no-counts” and various feeble-minded ancestors.

Eugenics, the theory that it is possible and desirable to improve future generations through selective breeding, gained its foothold in the United States at the laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor. The driving force behind the lab was Charles Davenport, one of the first and foremost proponents of the American eugenics movement. Davenport’s first studies dealt with physical traits like hair and eye color, yet his interests later shifted to the genetics of human traits that were not so easily quantifiable; for example, musical skill, sexual predilection and social behavior. This shift of focus was in part a response to similar studies going on in other countries. But it was also a direct reaction to the increasing concern of some segments of American society to the waves of immigration from Europe, and the shifts in the social and economic environment in the years leading up to World War II. Davenport tapped into the growing hysteria over the ‘foreign element’ and race relations to drum up support and funds for the creation of the Eugenics Records Office in hopes that in-depth study of the population would put the study of human traits on a firm, quantitative basis. He developed questionnaires that were taken from door-to-door by trained workers who recorded the characteristics of individuals from the interviewed family, a few of which made it into our family files at the library.  read more »

Weeksville was a community of African Americans founded in 1838 by a freed slave named James Weeks in an area straddling modern day Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights in Brooklyn. By the 1860s, according to Weeksville Society, it had become a cultural nexus and a draft riot safe haven for New York City's growing African American population. While much has been written about its people, both today, as in this NY Times article from 2005 and in the past, as in The Freedman's Torchlight, one of the first African American newspapers, not all that much geographic information remains about this historical landscape. There are traces that surface today, from the Hunterfly Road Houses to Weeksville Park, commemorating a landscape swallowed up by Brooklyn's street grid. One of the remaining pieces of the streetscape is Hunterfly Place.

This one block section of street was once part of the larger Hunterfly Road, the main thoroughfare of Weeksville that ran north to south from what is now Fulton Street to East New York Avenue. The following is a time series of maps of the area published between 1880 and 1908 from the NYPL Digital Gallery that document the physical changes to this community. These maps are part of the larger series of property mapping from the collections of The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division here at the NYPL.

Hopkins, G.M.
Detailed estate and old farm line atlas of the city of Brooklyn
1880

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Before her death in 1852, Nancy Nicol carefully cut a lock of hair from each of her three young children, her husband and herself, and sat down to make a memento for the family she would be leaving behind. Nancy had drawn out a family register, covered with curlicues and other inky flourishes, listing the milestone dates of births and marriages – there had been no deaths to record, yet. Next to each name, her husband David, her own and the children, George, Catherine and Martha, she fastened the curls of hair to the paper with ribbon and wax.

After Nancy Nicol’s death, the register was handed down through the generations until, at some point, there were no more immediate family members to pass it onto and it came into the holdings of the Genealogy collection of our library. The register, tucked away in series of folders, has sat in a file cabinet along with over 3,000 other genealogical gems, uncatalogued and out of reach of most family historians. This summer, the staff in the Milstein Division began to create records in our online catalog, CATNYP – providing signposts for researchers signifying that is always more material for them to look at before throwing up their arms in exasperation, faced with that looming brick wall.  read more »

The equation above, however overly simplified, represents the foundation of a family history. In this blog post I want to introduce a few guidebooks and indexes in section 15 of our open shelves. Section 15 focuses specifically on vital records of New York City, mainly records produced by places of worship or notices from newspapers. Below are three items from this section:

To start, let’s revisit the Works Progress Administration’s Guide to Church Vital Statistics in the City of New York, which I mentioned in a blog post a couple of weeks ago. This guide outlines the places of worship, churches and synagogues, in the five boroughs and lists the types of records (baptisms, marriages and funerals) held in each. Though the guide was created in 1940, it can still be helpful for locating vital records especially where public records are not available.

For those of you interested in early New York City vital records, it helps if your ancestors were Methodist. In addition to the Methodist Episcopal Church records available in the Manuscripts Division, we also have New York City Methodist marriages: 1785-1893, which is composed of a bride index and a groom index. The indexes refer to other collections within the Family History Library which you can order for use in a Family History Center.

We also have the Index to Marriages and Deaths in the New York Herald from 1835-1876. This is a great resource to use if your ancestors’ marriages of deaths did not make the New York Times which started in 1851. Since the New York Herald is not digitized for this entire period, this index makes marriage and death announcements much more accessible. The index provides you with the date of the event and refers you to the date and issue of the newspaper.

If you’re working on family histories of ancestors from New York City these are just three of the many reasons for you to visit us.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on dating photographs based on photographic process and contextual clues. If this topic interest you, you may want to visit the Humanities and Social Sciences Library for two classes on dating and preserving photographs.

This Friday, I will be teaching a class called Clues from Family Photographs and next week, Tuesday Erin Murphy, the Associate Conservator for Photographs and Paper, will be offering a class called Caring for Family Photographs. Both of these classes will be held at 3:15-4:30 in the South Court class rooms.

Works Progress Administration or the WPA (renamed Work Projects Administration in 1939) was in my opinion, an amazing relief program. Established in 1935 as part of the New Deal by the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the WPA was an ambitious federal jobs program created to provide blue collar and white collar jobs for the unemployed during the Great Depression. Work ranged from road construction to theatrical productions to research for the Library of Congress and the program employed millions of individuals.

Opponents of the WPA criticized its work as nepotistic, wasteful and communist. Regardless, however, of one’s opinion about the WPA, the wealth of resources it provides us in the form of photographs, posters, interviews and writing is invaluable to research of this time period. There are far too many sources produced by the WPA at the New York Public Library to list but I want to highlight a few from the Milstein Division which would benefit the local historian and genealogist.

The Federal Writers’ Project of the WPA produced guide books to various cities, states and regions. Many of these are on our open shelves in section 33, including a guide to New York City. The Division of Community Service Projects created guides to vital statistics of church archives for several cities. New York City’s guides are also on our open shelves on section 15, divided by borough and then denomination. These can be very helpful when searching for church records like baptisms, marriages and funerals which took place in the metropolitan area of New York City prior to 1940. In a future blog post I will go into more detail on how to use this resource.

Who doesn’t like old photographs? When I explain my responsibilities as a librarian here at the Milstein Division of the New York Public Library people seem most fascinated by my work with photographic prints. Perhaps this is due in part to the sense of history images capture that can elude written descriptions. This Fall I will be teaching a class on dating family photographs. Inspiration for developing this class came as I encountered undated and often times completely unmarked photographic prints. In this blog entry we’ll go through some of the steps one can take to approximate a date for a photograph looking at the example below:  read more »

Exciting news: The New York Public Library has received a very important gift from the Genealogical and Biographical Society. To read more about it, see the press release found on our website and the New York Times article from Saturday's paper.

A popular collection in the NYPL's Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, and one of my personal favorites, is the county atlas series, most of which was published following the passage of a federal law commemorating the centennial of the United States. We have recently digitized 43 atlases covering New York and New Jersey from our collection of more than 420 titles printed before 1900. See this page for a list of digital holdings from this series.

Their pages are filled not only with wonderfully detailed maps on the national, state, county, township and city level, but also with interesting, flat perspective engravings depicting local business districts, prominent estates and farms. Business directories sometimes accompany the map pages that, along with the drawings, provide a glimpse into local social and economic geography of the 19th century. They also give us an idea of who provided funding for the production of these subscription based publications.

For the past few months I have been working with a collection of photographs of various locations in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century. The collection will be available on our wonderful digital gallery in the future and I’m looking forward to seeing these images uploaded – some of them are really amazing.

I wrote a while ago about Hilah Paulmier and of the trail of documents that led me to verifying her identity. Recently I discovered another photographer who sparked my interest: William M. Van Der Weyde who captured the above image which is part of the Photographic Views of New York City Collection. While working on the images from the rest of New York I found some amazing photographs from Camp Black, a recruitment center for the Spanish-American War, also by Van Der Weyde. I will write again when these are available digitally.  read more »

The image shown above is a check written for seven million two thousand dollars for the purchase of the territory of Alaska in August 1, 1868. It is one of thousands of historical documents available in Footnote, a database recently acquired by the New York Public Library. Footnote is doing some interesting work in partnership with NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) digitizing and indexing many of their collections, making them searchable and available online. The collections are diverse and include the Constitutional Convention Records, Investigative Case Files of the Bureau of Investigation 1908-1922 (presently known as the FBI), the Pennsylvania Archives and Project Blue Book, UFO investigations from 1947-1969, to name a few. This is an excellent database for primary source documents.

An interesting dimension to this project is Footnote's use of social networking to enrich the collections. Users are allowed to upload their own content, whether photographs, newspaper articles or other kinds of historical documents. They can also annotate or describe documents within the database or create story pages on items they find particularly meaningful or interesting.

They are are still working out their search functions and I have yet to understand their relevancy ranking. Still, the more you work with the database the more you will find. In fact the collection is growing everyday. With all that it has to offer, I think Footnote is beneficial to genealogist and to historians alike.

Sometimes there are actually reasons for wanting a television. I wish I could have caught this show last week. African American Lives is a PBS series in which African American celebrities are presented with stories from their own family history. Here's a clip of an interview with comedian Chris Rock during which he learns about his great-great grandfather Julius Caesar Tingman.

I actually found Julius C. Tingman's Civil War pension record in a database we recently acquired called Footnote, which contains thousands of scanned historical documents. I'll be writing more about it soon. In honor of Black History Month, other databases have added more resources specific to African American genealogy like Ancestry which now contains Freedman Marriage Records and Southern Claims Commission Records, valuable resources for genealogical research of a population which was very under-represented.

We all like a good challenge sometimes and one presented itself to me in these three images:

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Ancestry Library Edition is one of the most heavily used subscription databases in the NYPL system. Some of you may already be familiar with this database as it is one of the best for genealogy research. Recently it has added a new collection to their content, U.S. Passport Applications, 1795-1925. Prior to the digitization of these records, genealogists and other researchers could only access these applications at the National Archives and Records Administration. The information found on these applications includes birth and marriage dates, names of parents and spouses, occupations, and purpose of travel. Oftentimes, particularly in the 20th century, a photograph of the applicant is included. Though it may be difficult to read, the above image is a passport application for Theodore Roosevelt on May 9, 1881.

The addition of this collection to Ancestry Library Edition is a boon to genealogists and historians alike.