Secrets of the Census, Part 6: 1900

Our last post in this series was in January when we reminded our readers of what happened to the 1890 census and why we don't have digital copies of it for most of our ancestors. (Did you miss that post? You can read it here.) We now come to the start of a new century and a world that was in the throes of major changes. It was the year The Wizard of Oz was published, work began on the subway system in New York City, and those new-fangled automobiles scaring horses and humans were labeled "devil wagons." Hawaii became a U.S. territory, McKinley was president, and a new baseball club, the American League, was formed in Chicago. The census takers for the 1900 federal census began their jobs on 1 June and were given just thirty days to complete their tasks, no small feat for a U.S. population that exceeded 76,000.000! This first twentieth-century census gives us new and important information on our ancestors.

Kudos to Reclaim the Records Once Again for the New York State Death Index!

Our friends at the amazing Reclaim the Records have chalked up another victory for genealogists who had ancestors who died in New York from 1880 to 2017. We have written about this small but mighty nonprofit several times before, alerting our readers to their ongoing battles for indexes and records that should be public but are being held out of sight by unending red tape. Now, the group has announced another victory which many of us will be very pleased to see. Here are the details . . .