Blog Posts by Subject: Genealogy

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 

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:

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.

There's a great selection of Staten Island maps and Atlases in the NYPL Digital Gallery. Using the "Pan and Zoom" feature the maps can be enlarged to the point where you can read street names and even the names of residents of individual houses. "Pan and Zoom" is not available on all maps, however.

Here are some of the maps and atlases available:

Atlas of Staten Island, Richmond County, New York, from official records and surveys; compiled and drawn by F. W. Beers.

Published in 1874, this Atlas contains 35 maps of neighborhoods on Staten Island including property lines, names of property owners, and outlines of individual 

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 

This is a picture of Algot Lange. Do you know who he is? I had not heard about him until last week when a patron approached the General Research Division reference desk asking about him. Mr. Lange was a Swedish explorer who wrote two books about his adventures in the Amazon during the early twentieth century. He’s an interesting fellow and a reminder that not all of history has been told: there is not a single entry for Algot Lange in any of our biographical databases nor is he the subject of any book. I decided that was reason enough to trace his story by means of historical documents.

Through a database called Ancestry Library Edition, I was able to find passenger lists 

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

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