Gilded Hour, New York & Your Family History

I have heard from more than a few Gilded Hour readers who wonder about their own family history and how to find out more. For example:

…Our great-grandmother, [name], was a doctor in NYC at around this time, so it was truly interesting, and sobering, to read about some of the things she may have endured as she pursued her chosen path. We do not know much about her during this time in her life, and I would like to learn more. Any suggestions as to the best places for me to look to track her down?

Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1892. “In diaries and letter from the late nineteenth century, women medical students sometimes wrote of their resolve to prove that they could engage in all aspects of medical study and practice without compromising dignity or sacrificing the appearance of femininity. The choice of dress for the dissecting room was one common subject in such reflections.”

This is a big question, and the answer depends on how much time, energy, and money you want to invest in the search for information about your relative. There are hundreds of online resources for genealogical inquiries, of course. Dozens of them provide good tutorials on how to get started.  For someone without any research experience who has a fairly limited question they’d like to answer, I would suggest the following steps:

1. Gather as much information as you can from living family members and documents. Dates and places for all four grandparents and all eight grandparents, whatever you can find. Even if it’s conflicting, you need to keep track of it. Make sure you get older relatives to cough up birth certificates that may be gathering dust in an old desk.
2. When you have as much information as there is to get from family members and resources, sit down and make a list of what you don’t have for the four grandparents and eight great grandparents. Dates and places of birth, death, marriage, parent and children and sibling names etc.
3. Depending on how deeply you want to pursue this, start tracking down those documents. Say you know that a grandfather was born in Buffalo in 1920. There are ways to track down his official birth certificate and to request a copy. It will cost a couple bucks, and take a little time. Whether or not you want to take this step, you can move on. This research step may become easier if you decide to pursue the suggestion I’ve made below.
4. Once you know something about the relative who interests you most (for example, this reader’s great grandmother who was a physician in New York city in the late 19th century) the single biggest source of information would be the census. The 1880 census is a great source of information. How to get to it, and how to read it — that’s another issue. If you think you’ll be satisfied with tracing down Dr. Great Grandmother alone, then here’s my suggestion: sign up for a free month at ancestry.com, and then do  not waste a minute.   Put Dr. Granny in as the first person in a family tree with whatever information have (dates of birth, death, etc) and do a general search. Focus on the census to start. Ancestry.com will show you both the actual census page (which you can save and/or download) as well as the transcribed data.  Read what you find carefully. Look up the address on a map (more on this if you’re interested). Consider her neighbors (other doctors? More of your relatives?). You can find maps of the city neighborhoods for the same time period, so look at where she lived, and see if there are clinics or hospitals nearby. 
5. Once you find one trace of her on Ancestry.com, you’ll be able to pick up all kinds of hints. Add it all to her on the family tree you created, but this is important: download everything you find too  (as you’ll only be there for a month), and figure some way to organize it electronically even if it’s only everything in one file.
6. Now you’re at a crossroads. Say you’ve found Dr. Granny in five different censuses, you’ve got a lot of information but you still don’t know about where she went to medical school or practiced medicine. At this point you have to settle in for some serious research. If there’s interest, I can go into this in more detail on this at some point.

To make a point, I put this Dr. Great Grandmother into both the Ancestry.com and Google, and hit pay dirt right away. I found her obituary in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Volume 75 (1920), and with the dates I got from that source I went to Ancestry and got a (1) a listing in a medical directory when she was still in practice, with information about her medical school, etc. (2) a family tree with sources, and from there (3)  her 1880 Census entry. I’ve blocked out the names because I don’t have permission to share that information–I did this on the fly.

The census is especially interesting.

In 1880 she was 17, married, with a six month old child, and she’s listed as keeping house. How she got from that place in her life to medical school — that would be an interesting story, one worth pursuing. Just to be clear: this was a tremendously easy search. Most are not.