Humanities and Social Sciences. Milstein Division

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 »

Check out more images here.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This certainly is the election of my lifetime. If you’ve already voted today you probably had to wait a while to do so. This morning I’ve been spending time with the Encyclopedia of U.S. campaigns, elections, and electoral behavior. While it was just published in 2008 and is excellent for historical review, so much has changed this election season that I am wondering if an addendum will be published in the near future. I’m looking forward to new studies that will take the innovations used in the 2008 election into account as well as the recent grassroots movements in politics. But for right now, I’m just eager to see who wins.

Writing from the edge of my seat…

For the most part materials at the Milstein Division include print and electronic resources. A particularly unique collection held in our stacks is a seven-volume set of scrapbooks filled with World War I and World War II shoulder patches. Recently, these scrapbooks were treated by the Conservation Lab staff who lovingly restored them, cleaning the patches and encapsulating the pages. Conservation staff enjoyed this project thoroughly and invited Mr. Burger to the lab to view the newly stabilized albums; the meeting was recorded in the above video. The scrapbooks have been returned to the closed stacks of the Milstein Division and are now available for limited and supervised viewing.

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.

The Milstein Division will be offering Digital Gotham this afternoon at 3:15 in the South Court classrooms which are located in the Humanities and Social Sciences Library. Digital Gotham is a free class that explores online resources on New York City history. This hands-on class will introduce myriad resources—from digitized newspapers, magazines, and books to photographs, menus, and maps—many of which are available from your own desktop.

Digital Gotham is open to the public and requires no preregistration. However, seats are available on a first-come-first serve basis, so we encourage you to come five to ten minutes before the class begins. We look forward to seeing you there!
 
 

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 »

While riding the subway over the past weeks I couldn’t help but notice the posters promoting the month of May as the month of the bike. Since 1990, May has been officially designated as Bike Month NYC, celebrating cyclists, bicycles and generally, all things bike, by sponsoring bike tours, rallys, and other events. Every May I see thousands of bicyclists pedaling through my neighborhood in the Five-Boro Bike Tour (which sold out rapidly this year) and every year I’m pleasantly surprised by the sheer number of people involved. New York City has had a long relationship with the bike. Admittedly it’s been a bumpy road, but really it was love at first sight, though perhaps infatuation might be a better term.

Way back in 1868, New Yorkers were swept up in a craze over the fore-runner to the modern bicycle, the velocipede. Developed in France, the two-wheeled velocipede made its way across the Atlantic to the United States in the 1860s and was taken up by middle-class New Yorkers as a novelty. However, within a few years a full-fledged velocipede-mania developed, eventually dying down in the early 1870s. In 1868 and 1869 alone, nearly a dozen riding schools and tracks opened up across Manhattan and Brooklyn and a number of velocipede manufacturers set up shop in the city as well, fueled by the high demand for more and better versions of the velocipede. Newspapers and periodicals of the day were constantly commenting upon the craze and the effect it had on city life, particularly in the streets and parks. The consequences of the introduction of the velocipede in New York City were many, ranging from discussion of the need for new laws to regulate traffic to debate over the propriety of women riding velocipedes. A nice little article from the New York Times describing the intensity of excitement over the velocipede can be read here

The New York Public Library, of course, has tons of material on the history and development of the bicycle. There are books on the velocipede as it was in the mid-nineteenth century such as, The Velocipede: Its Past, Present and Future, published in 1869, as well as more recent takes on the history of the bicycle like Herlihy’s Bicycle: the History. However, as I enjoy reading contemporary accounts of events I went to our historical newspaper and periodical databases to get some first hand takes on the mania that swept New York and the rest of the country. A good database to start with is the ProQuest Historical Database which provides access to historical runs of major U.S. newspaper and over a 1,000 periodicals. But there are many more electronic resources available, like Harper’s Weekly and America’s Historical Newspapers , both of which provide tons of material on 19th century America.
Another source to keep in mind, especially when researching a machine such as the velocipede, which was constantly being improved upon, is Google’s Patents Search. While periodicals in the 19th century, such as Scientific American, frequently updated readers on new patents and other technological advancements they don’t show readers the patent in all of its glory. My favorite thus far is the Land & Water Velocipede of 1869; but really any patent search for “Improved Velocipede” yields testimony to the endless inventiveness of Americans.

Happy Bike Month!