I'm back doing research again. I took time off while i recovered from my Mom's passing and settling her estate. I'm only posting now because i found something i wanted to remember (and thought other people would want to know)

The NY STATE CENSUS for 1915 (at least for my ancestors) has a screwy index! The census taker dittoed the last name and then put in the middle initial and then the full first name. This resulted in listings that are now all indexed with the middle initial instead of a whole first name. This makes finding entries a lot more challenging.

Just thought you might want to know.

Ancestors from New York: Celebrate!

If you have ancestors from New York and access to Ancestry.com today could be your lucky day. There are many indexes to NY censuses that recently came online. Some have been there for ages but I did not go looking for them because I did not know they even existed. I don’t want you to suffer the same fate.

So here is the direct link to all the cool NY stuff at ancestry.com:

http://www.ancestry.com/search/locality/dbpage.aspx?i=d&tp=2&p=35&cj=1&netid=cj&o_xid=0001231185&o_lid=0001231185&categoryFilterID=35&showPaging=true

: basically it’s a query result from the ancestry.com home page. I’ve written before (Better Search Results) about how important it is to search specific card catalog items instead of always doing broad searches. This collection of NY databases is a treasure trove of information. I’ve posted a partial list below from the ancestry.com link above.

Specifically the NY census databases include – drum roll please – 1890 and 1892! The 1890 police census is for NY City residents (not inmates) and is almost complete and the 1892 census is for the whole state. For those newbies out there the issue is that the Federal 1890 census was destroyed and only small fragments remain. This means that there is a 20 year census record gap between 1880 and 1900 if you only use the Federal Census records.

I have a lot of NY state ancestors and finding these databases has been wonderful. I used to wish all my ancestors had lived in Missouri (with their huge online repositories of vital records) but now I can be grateful that many were from New York.

I hope you find your ancestors spent some time in the Empire State, too.

Happy Hunting!