Sometimes genealogical miracles occur. It happened a few years ago, when, after years of severe restrictions, Pennsylvania opened its vital records to the general public, and, this past week, it happened again. This time, it is New York City, which, after staunchly defending its right to deprive the public access to public records, suddenly launched a stunning new website that opened vital records from the New York City Municipal Archives to anyone who wants to see them.
Unlike the rest of New York State, the vital records for the City of New York are held at the Municipal Archives, which, according to this new website, holds “one of the largest [collections] in the country.” Finally, after years of fighting to withhold their records, the archives quietly began a digitization project in 2013 “to provide access to 13.3 million birth, death, and marriage records. As of 2022, 70% of these holdings have been digitized.”
Many years ago, the records had been microfilmed and were available either in person or at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. The quality of the microfilm, however, was poor, and finding a record often meant sifting through rolls of indexes and volumes of documents filed in random order.
The new website is called Historical Vital Records of NYC, and, although its search engines are still in their infancy and the digitization is not yet complete, the site contains beautiful, clear images of birth, death, and marriage certificates for the five boroughs of the city, although not all years for each borough. Kudos also go to volunteers from the Genealogy Federation of Long Island for spending many years transcribing hard-copy indexes into spreadsheets so these records could be searched.
To their credit, instead of rushing, the archives’ Conservation and Preservation Unit has worked carefully through the collection to “repair and preserve the original documents.” It is easy to see how successful they were. If you have ever worked with the microfilms of these records, you can compare the faded, blurry film to these crisp, sharp images and do a genealogy happy dance!
The documents that are currently completed and online are as follows:
- Bronx: 1872 to 1873, 1876, 1888 to 1891, 1895 to 1909
- Kings (Brooklyn): 1866 to 1909
- Manhattan: 1855, 1857 to 1861, 1863 to 1865, 1866 to 1909
- Queens: 1866, 1876, 1883, 1886, 1888 to 1909
- Richmond (Staten Island): 1898 to 1909
The search for birth and death can be done via name in the beta search. However, the website says, “Marriage licenses are not indexed by name but by license number. You will need to go to one of the other online sources to obtain the number from an index before you can search.” A few of the places to find these indexes online are:
Currently, the Municipal Archives is digitizing the marriage licenses from 1908 to 1949. When that is done, they plan to work on Manhattan death records from 1867 to 1948, which are now only on microfilm. The archives holds registers for years prior to 1898, which are on microfilm as well. They are not yet digitized, but they do exist.
Searching the Website
This is a three-step process.
- From the home page of the website, search for the certificate you need, either by browsing or using the certificate number search. If you want to search by name, go to the top of the page and use the beta Search tab. Use the purple slider under the "Year Range" to narrow down the years. Clicking the purple button will yield a set of thumbnails, and each links to a document.
- Click on the thumbnail of interest to open the actual document.
- Once you have looked at the certificate to be sure you have the right one, go back to the thumbnail and right/control-click on it to bring up a sub-menu that will allow you to save the digital image.
As you can see in the example above, the quality of the images is outstanding, and the website is extremely easy to use. For those with ancestors who were born, married, or died in New York City, this is truly the proverbial genealogical gold mine!
Press release from the New York Municipal Archives
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Thanks to a blog post from Judy G. Russell, “NYC historical vital records go online!” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 16 Mar 2022) for alerting us to this new resource.
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