Just blame that beguiling email notice from Ancestry.com. It's almost like they said, "Pssssst! Here's a hint about your brick wall ancestor." Only in this case, it was a message telling me that they found a hint about my own mother—quite a detour from the person I've been planning to research this month.
Well, what's there to learn about one's own mom, right? You think you know everything about the parents you grew up with. But no, this message was too beguiling. I clicked through to discover my mother's entry in the New York City Voter Registers from the years when the high school graduate had arrived fresh from Ohio to seek her fortune in the Big Apple.
I knew about her dreams, after attending acting school, to break into stardom somehow—stage, radio, movies. I knew about the various venues where she had worked. But cashier at a shop at Rockefeller Center? That entry in the official record wasn't in the plans she had recited to me. Perhaps when she registered to vote, she had run into a dry spell. Everyone has to make a living somehow.
While it was fun to see which party was named in her voter registration, or map out the route from her apartment on Lexington Avenue to her job at Rockefeller Center, the bigger gift of receiving that emailed hint from Ancestry was knowing that I now had access to the actual digitized registers, not just a transcription of key fields skimmed off the pages. Since this month's focus is on one branch of my Polish ancestors, I could now search through that same record set for the entries of all my other New York relatives, both direct ancestors and all their collateral lines from 1915 through 1958. A lot of work, to be sure, but what a treat for my researching curiosity.
While this record set is a new discovery for me, the treat is in the full access to the record, versus being begrudgingly satisfied with the mere transcription. Exploring the full record set allows me to satisfy my need to be nosy about my ancestors, to suck out the marrow of their daily lives' minutiae to somehow build a clearer picture of what was important to them in their day's routine.
New York has always been a difficult place for me to research, mostly on account of the long-time inaccessibility of their records. Both New York State and the city itself have been a problem for many other researchers, as well. I've got plenty of company when, for instance, I once again have an opportunity to cheer the Freedom of Information Act victories at Reclaim the Records, such as the searchable New York State Death Index, now available free online.
Every new addition accessible for free online is a plus for all of us. In this case, a little detour through the records of New York State now available online is a personal treat for me, even though it is a detour from my research plans for this month. Even though my research is now generations removed from that point, there's always time to go back and add more details to the profiles I've long since created for the closest of my near relatives.
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