Kate Cordes's blog

When reading family histories, as I often find myself doing in the Milstein Division, I frequently come across glowing depictions of people’s ancestors, of the grandmother who made the best peach cobbler this side of the Mississippi, or the aunt who was adored by all the neighborhood children and stray cats. For obvious reasons, less favorable descriptions of one’s family are not as common. Rarely do we come across stories of the egotistical great-grandfather or the lay-about uncle. Even rarer are those condemnations of whole branches of one’s family tree, as if one’s family passed down undesirable habits and traits generation after generation. Yet these are exactly the judgments that are transcribed in the research notes, or ‘Family Trait Files’, that were compiled for the Eugenics Records Office during the early decades of the last century.

Many months ago, I posted a piece about the valuable, but underused, collection of genealogical material in our division known as the Family Files. Among the myriad research notes, family newsletters, photographs, and miscellaneous material are a small number of files compiled by genealogists for submission to the Eugenics Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. It is in these files that, alongside notes on mother’s exceptional musical talent, we find accounts of the uncultivated, the “general no-counts” and various feeble-minded ancestors.

Eugenics, the theory that it is possible and desirable to improve future generations through selective breeding, gained its foothold in the United States at the laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor. The driving force behind the lab was Charles Davenport, one of the first and foremost proponents of the American eugenics movement. Davenport’s first studies dealt with physical traits like hair and eye color, yet his interests later shifted to the genetics of human traits that were not so easily quantifiable; for example, musical skill, sexual predilection and social behavior. This shift of focus was in part a response to similar studies going on in other countries. But it was also a direct reaction to the increasing concern of some segments of American society to the waves of immigration from Europe, and the shifts in the social and economic environment in the years leading up to World War II. Davenport tapped into the growing hysteria over the ‘foreign element’ and race relations to drum up support and funds for the creation of the Eugenics Records Office in hopes that in-depth study of the population would put the study of human traits on a firm, quantitative basis. He developed questionnaires that were taken from door-to-door by trained workers who recorded the characteristics of individuals from the interviewed family, a few of which made it into our family files at the library.  read more »

This Friday, the Milstein Division will be offering a free class on the best online resources to use in researching New York City’s history. I invite all students, history buffs and library lovers to come to the Humanities and Social Sciences Library to find out more about all the databases and websites used to research the people and the events that contributed to our city’s history. For this month’s class, I’ll be focusing on the history of this library’s immediate neighborhood – from the Crystal Palace and the Croton Reservoir to the wealthy inhabitants of swanky Fifth Avenue. We’ll be looking at census records, old photographs and postcards, maps, and newspapers to search for the stories, records and documents the neighborhood and its residents have left behind.

Here are the details:
Class: Digital Gotham
When: Friday, December 19th; 3:15-4:15
Where: South Court classrooms (1st Floor)
Humanities & Social Sciences Library
42nd Street & Fifth Avenue

I'm looking forward to seeing you there.

Before her death in 1852, Nancy Nicol carefully cut a lock of hair from each of her three young children, her husband and herself, and sat down to make a memento for the family she would be leaving behind. Nancy had drawn out a family register, covered with curlicues and other inky flourishes, listing the milestone dates of births and marriages – there had been no deaths to record, yet. Next to each name, her husband David, her own and the children, George, Catherine and Martha, she fastened the curls of hair to the paper with ribbon and wax.

After Nancy Nicol’s death, the register was handed down through the generations until, at some point, there were no more immediate family members to pass it onto and it came into the holdings of the Genealogy collection of our library. The register, tucked away in series of folders, has sat in a file cabinet along with over 3,000 other genealogical gems, uncatalogued and out of reach of most family historians. This summer, the staff in the Milstein Division began to create records in our online catalog, CATNYP – providing signposts for researchers signifying that is always more material for them to look at before throwing up their arms in exasperation, faced with that looming brick wall.  read more »

In my last post a few weeks ago I wrote of the history of rioting and protesting in Tompkins Square Park. New York has always been a riotous city, where citizens have time and time again taken to the streets to demonstrate, strike and protest. Over the centuries the nature and character of these events has evolved, as has the reaction of the general public and the police to these group manifestations of displeasure. The subject of popular disorder and collective action or violence tends to be a fairly popular topic among researchers at the library and I’ve found that studying riots and strikes in New York provides a great way to gauge the social and economic climate of the city at different points in time.

Early on in the city’s history, from colonial times up until the first decade of the 19th century, rioting in New York was generally an accepted part of the city’s political culture, a legacy of English tradition. Many scholars who have written on the history of public protest in early America note that prior to the 1830s, most of the protests and more violent riots were of two kinds; either they were of a distinctly political nature, such as the post-revolutionary Anti-Federalist riots, or they were aimed at enforcing community standards and widely held moral values, such as the Doctors’ Riots in 1788 or the bawdy house raids of 1793 and 1799.  read more »

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the protest in Tompkins Square Park that devolved into a 5-hour long clash between police, East Village residents and other park habitués. The day following the riots the New York Post dubbed the incident "Night of Rage" while the Daily News ran with "Tompkins Park Fury." However, there wasn’t just one violent confrontation to be remembered. Rather there were a series of demonstrations and pitched protests during the eighties and early nineties between older residents, newcomers to the neighborhood, the police, neighborhood squatters, and the younger crowd that frequented the park and surrounding streets.

The protests and clashes of late July and early August 1988 were alternatively described in the newspapers as being a result of a newly instated 1 A.M. park curfew, the influx of homeless camped out there, the noise of the crowds that gathered in the park to play music and hang out, and the overarching dispute over housing and perceived gentrification of the neighborhood. These were the years when “Die Yuppie Scum” seemed a valid and meaningful protest chant and graffiti often expressed other anarchist desires and pipe dreams. What drove the August 6th anti-curfew protest over the edge was not only the rowdy and violent behavior of some of the protesters that night, but the extreme reaction of the police force to the protest.  read more »

Everyday here in the Milstein Division, we get questions from all over the city and around the country about the history of New York City. Questions range from the very specific, “What was the weather in Manhattan on May 7th 1864?” to the dauntingly vague, “My great-grandfather lived in New York, his name was Patrick Murphy. Could you send me information on him?” Fortunately, the library’s collection of reference material on New York City history is astounding and rare is the question that goes unanswered. But for those who don’t have direct access to our print collection and are interested in researching the history of our great metropolis, I invite you to a free research class at the library this week.  read more »

While riding the subway over the past weeks I couldn’t help but notice the posters promoting the month of May as the month of the bike. Since 1990, May has been officially designated as Bike Month NYC, celebrating cyclists, bicycles and generally, all things bike, by sponsoring bike tours, rallys, and other events. Every May I see thousands of bicyclists pedaling through my neighborhood in the Five-Boro Bike Tour (which sold out rapidly this year) and every year I’m pleasantly surprised by the sheer number of people involved. New York City has had a long relationship with the bike. Admittedly it’s been a bumpy road, but really it was love at first sight, though perhaps infatuation might be a better term.

Way back in 1868, New Yorkers were swept up in a craze over the fore-runner to the modern bicycle, the velocipede. Developed in France, the two-wheeled velocipede made its way across the Atlantic to the United States in the 1860s and was taken up by middle-class New Yorkers as a novelty. However, within a few years a full-fledged velocipede-mania developed, eventually dying down in the early 1870s. In 1868 and 1869 alone, nearly a dozen riding schools and tracks opened up across Manhattan and Brooklyn and a number of velocipede manufacturers set up shop in the city as well, fueled by the high demand for more and better versions of the velocipede. Newspapers and periodicals of the day were constantly commenting upon the craze and the effect it had on city life, particularly in the streets and parks. The consequences of the introduction of the velocipede in New York City were many, ranging from discussion of the need for new laws to regulate traffic to debate over the propriety of women riding velocipedes. A nice little article from the New York Times describing the intensity of excitement over the velocipede can be read here

The New York Public Library, of course, has tons of material on the history and development of the bicycle. There are books on the velocipede as it was in the mid-nineteenth century such as, The Velocipede: Its Past, Present and Future, published in 1869, as well as more recent takes on the history of the bicycle like Herlihy’s Bicycle: the History. However, as I enjoy reading contemporary accounts of events I went to our historical newspaper and periodical databases to get some first hand takes on the mania that swept New York and the rest of the country. A good database to start with is the ProQuest Historical Database which provides access to historical runs of major U.S. newspaper and over a 1,000 periodicals. But there are many more electronic resources available, like Harper’s Weekly and America’s Historical Newspapers , both of which provide tons of material on 19th century America.
Another source to keep in mind, especially when researching a machine such as the velocipede, which was constantly being improved upon, is Google’s Patents Search. While periodicals in the 19th century, such as Scientific American, frequently updated readers on new patents and other technological advancements they don’t show readers the patent in all of its glory. My favorite thus far is the Land & Water Velocipede of 1869; but really any patent search for “Improved Velocipede” yields testimony to the endless inventiveness of Americans.

Happy Bike Month!

Last week, while doing some research on abolitionism in one of our best historical newspaper databases, I came across some references to organizations called Free Produce Societies. As I had previously never come across these groups, I decided to do some further research. Free Produce Associations were formed in the early decades of the 19th century by radical abolitionists, generally Quakers and free blacks, who hoped to disengage themselves from participating in a culture they found to be both un-Christian and un-American. Through these societies they ran stores and markets in which they tried to pool their resources and their skills in order to offer for sale only products of free, i.e. not slave, labor. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a popular or respected activity and most of the time their very existence was looked upon with hostility by most of society. These groups tried to accomplish a nearly impossible task given how much America at the time relied on the enslaved populace for many of their consumer goods.

Right after I started reading about these associations, most notably the societies formed in Philadelphia, I read two back to back posts on the Hand-made blog which I found to be a pleasant reminder of historical continuity and of recurring movements in our nation’s record. I began to think about other times in United States history when individuals have gotten together to form an alternative to the mainstream marketplace, a place where an individual’s commitment to an ideal would not be compromised. Granted, the Free Produce Societies did not have an easy go of it considering the low opinion most people had of abolitionists during the 1840s, but they did try to make it work for quite a long time.

The database I mentioned earlier, The American Periodical Series, contains over 1,000 periodicals and newspapers and it includes two of the earliest and most radical abolitionist papers in the United States, Benjamin Lundy's The Genius of Universal Emancipation and William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator. Both of these papers are great for primary source research on abolitionism.

Additional images from the NYC Tenement House Department collection of photographic negatives have been added to the Digital Gallery recently. This Summer a number of images from the collection were uploaded, most of which showed the outhouses the Tenement Department photographed for their records. With the new images, we get to see some interiors of the buildings. Having these images on the Digital Gallery is especially good news as this collection cannot be fully accessed by the public due to the delicate nature of the glass plate negatives.

Another new collection in the Digital Gallery is a scrapbook of photographs taken around 1900. The title given to the scrapbook, Frank E. Downs. Trip to Nome, Alaska, May to Sept. 1900, is slightly misleading as less than a quarter of the images are of Downs’ gold-mining expedition to Nome. The other photographs depict travels all over the United States and Mexico, from Mount Desert Island to Mexico City. The quality of the snapshots sometimes leaves a bit to be desired, but where else could you so easily find turn of the century photos of street scenes from an Alaskan mining town or a picture of the “Hot Springs’ Nine” baseball team playing against a women’s team? Nowhere else, I’d wager.

With a bit of research I found that the scrapbook which belonged to Florence D. Muzzy from Connecticut was bequeathed to the library by Florence’s daughter Adrienne, a librarian at the New York Public Library who, according to her obituary, also left the library her household furnishings.

Ancestry Library Edition is one of the most heavily used subscription databases in the NYPL system. Some of you may already be familiar with this database as it is one of the best for genealogy research. Recently it has added a new collection to their content, U.S. Passport Applications, 1795-1925. Prior to the digitization of these records, genealogists and other researchers could only access these applications at the National Archives and Records Administration. The information found on these applications includes birth and marriage dates, names of parents and spouses, occupations, and purpose of travel. Oftentimes, particularly in the 20th century, a photograph of the applicant is included. Though it may be difficult to read, the above image is a passport application for Theodore Roosevelt on May 9, 1881.

The addition of this collection to Ancestry Library Edition is a boon to genealogists and historians alike.

Here is a photograph of the corner of 42nd Street and Sixth Ave. It is part of the Street and Townscape of Metropolitan New York City Collection in our Digital Gallery. Notice anything strikingly different about this picture from the present state of the location?