TIP OF THE WEEK – NYC RECORDS GO ONLINE!
This tip comes from Jill Morelli, past president of SGS, and her source for this tip is the March 16, 2022, blog by Judy Russell, the Legal Genealogist. And by the way, we are so excited to have Judy Russell lined up for our fall seminar!
Do you have New York City connections? In March 2022, the NYC Municipal Archives launched free online access to millions of NYC historical vital records – birth, death, and marriage. Finally! In the past, we only had the index on Ancestry, and while helpful, it was a derivative record and did not contain all the information available on the originals.
If you want to read more about the launch of this record set, Judy Russell (our Fall Seminar speaker) discussed it in her daily blog The Legal Genealogist: https://www.legalgenealogist.com/2022/03/16/nyc-vitals-online/
In mid-March, 9 million records were available online with another 4 million yet to be digitized and uploaded.
The record set is a little hard to find, so bookmark it if you plan to spend much time there: https://a860-historicalvitalrecords.nyc.gov
The easiest way to access the records for your ancestor is to find the index entry at Ancestry. Make note of the certificate number. Now, go to the NYC site and enter that certificate number.
The site has a Browse All tab: just insert your certificate number.
The site has a Search tab: here you can search by certification or by name.
In both cases you can search on a particular borough.
The site does warn us that 25% of all births before 1909 were never reported.
Happy Hunting!