Reclaim the Records Introduces the Online New York City GEOGRAPHIC Birth Index

Dick Eastman · October 31, 2019 · Online Sites · 2 Comments

The following is a quote from the latest Reclaim the Records newsletter:

INTRODUCING THE NEW YORK CITY GEOGRAPHIC BIRTH INDEX

A new tool to find people born in New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially if their birth records had spelling variants or poor handwriting

Hello again from Reclaim The Records! We’re that little non-profit activist group of genealogists, historians, teachers, journalists, open government advocates, and other troublemakers who fight for the release of historical and genealogical materials from government agencies, archives, and libraries.

Today, we’d like to tell you about some new historical records that we’ve acquired, which we’ve put online for free public use, for the first time anywhere! They’ve never been available outside of New York City before.

Introducing the New York City GEOGRAPHIC Birth Index! This record set is an index to all births in New York City from roughly 1880-1912 (or 1917-ish in some cases outside of Manhattan). But unlike a typical birth index arranged by surname or by date, this one is arranged by the child’s place of birth, the actual exact street address! Hence the term Geographic.

We think there’s about 2.8 million names in here, maybe more.

You can read more in the newsletter’s web site at: https://mailchi.mp/reclaimtherecords/introducing-the-new-york-city-geographic-birth-index.