Now Indexing : Back to NYC Naturalization Records

It's so difficult being homeless. Our genealogical society may have big plans and hopes, but we are still strapped to a very small budget. Despite our sixty-plus years of existence, we still depend on the graces of others for those tangible items which help any office run smoothly. Come to think of it, we even depend on others to supply that "office" space for us to conduct our business.

All that to say, it's hard to plan for training sessions for our members when we don't even have a place to host them. I'm still waiting on the word about whether we can use a computer-friendly site to train our members on how to index records at FamilySearch. Our plans for a team-centric indexing challenge may have to wait until next year. Fortunately, that year is drawing ever closer.

In the meantime, I'm playing it solo in the indexing department. I returned to my usual haunts for this month's indexing installment. New York City is always good for more naturalization records. Besides, I keep hoping to uncover a few more relatives in the process.

While there are some digitized entries from this record set already searchable online, New York being New York, there are many more to be indexed. I can always be sure of going back to the FamilySearch indexing website and finding another set of New York City naturalization records to research.

This time, I indexed records concerning quite a few immigrants from Ireland—wondering, all the while, whether the ones who came from locales of my father-in-law's family might have known any of our relatives. The world becomes a much smaller place, once we have all these documents at our fingertips, rather than seeing the crowded blur of people rushing past our faces. Digitized records in searchable form not only make a genealogist's tasks more quickly executed; they also allow us to see more of the world's timeline in microcosm form.