Direct Me NYC 1940 - Find Your Elusive NYC Family Member

Courtesy NYPL

If you're still having trouble locating a family member in the 1940 census, there's a resource available online from the New York Public Library.

Direct Me NYC 1940 helps researchers marry the 1940 census with the digitized phone books of all five boroughs of New York City, using Steve Morse's One-Step site.

There's a great article up at the New York Times about it.

The project makes it possible to cross-reference NYC residents’ names and addresses with the 1940 census data made public last year, which includes the person’s age, income, education, occupation, and residences in 1935 and 1940.

There's a place for users to share their discoveries, and as usual, Thomas MacEntee has been here before us. The site also provides context for your finds with a streaming banner of 1940 news from the NY Times archives. 

"The result," according to the New York Times, "is serendipitous and eye-opening for scholars and family genealogists searching out their roots." I agree: the user interface, instructions, and contextual results are beautifully done.

Now if some other big cities (I'm looking at you, Chicago) would follow suit. 

Tech Tuesday: Password Managers

I put my 300th password in my password manager today. I can't decide if that's scary or impressive. Probably both.

If you're not using an app to manage your passwords and logins securely, please take a moment to review what's out there and get started.

For Macs, click here.

For PCs, click here.

Instead of using Post-its or your address book or your memory, consider an application that manages this for you so you only have to remember one password from now on.

Mother's Day: Look for the "Hidden Mother" in Family Photographs

Hidden Mother image, courtesy Retronaut

Photography collectors may already know about the “hidden mother” in early photographs, but I haven't read much about this in connection with genealogy.

According to the The Hidden Mother Flickr group, there was a photographic "practice where the mother, often disguised or hiding, often under a spread, holds her baby tightly for the photographer to insure a sharply focused image." 

Hidden mother image with experimental cropping. Courtesy The Accident Mysteries 

The Accidental Mysteries blog goes a step further and suggests that "most infants during that time were photographed with their mothers holding them. The intended picture was ultimately headed for a frame or mat, so the child would sit in the mothers lap for the photo. When the picture was taken, the mother simply was cropped out to serve as the backdrop."

There are many fascinating examples of this photographic phenomenon, dating from tintypes up to the turn-of-the-century at the Flickr group and at the Retronaut blog.

Have you found one of these in your family photos? I'm going to take a second look at mine.

Follow Friday: Forvo.com

I've been doing a lot of work on my Prussian lines in my Germanic Genealogy class. My eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Prussian villages are located in Poland since the end of World War II, and of course now have Polish names. 

I've been using Forvo.com ("All the words in the world. Pronounced.") to try to be able to understand how one pronounces these village names.

For example, Freienwalde, Pomerania, Prussia, is now Chociwel, Poland. Click here to hear is how it's pronounced, which of course is nothing like how I would have guessed.

Do you have some words in foreign languages you'd like to understand better? Try Forvo.com.