Welcome to my blog!

Truth be told, I've never been much of a blogger. Pictures of cool records or funny grave markers are much more my speed. On the other hand, I get a lot of questions about what my day-to-day work looks like as a genealogist, and a blog is a great way to showcase that.

This blog is going to be a little different: very visual with lots of pictures of the books I'm reading, the repositories I'm visiting, and the like. Please feel free to comment, share, and suggest things you'd like to see.

To kick things off, here is a really cool book I stumbled upon at the New York Public Library. It was published in 1852 and was absolutely crumbling, but on the first page was this tiny, colorful map of Williamsburgh, which used to be a separate village (later city) in Kings County. Today, it is a neighborhood in Brooklyn best known for its high concentration of hipsters.

Map of Williamsburgh, Kings County, 1852.

If you look closely, you can see that both the north-south and east-west streets were numbered, which must have been awfully confusing. It does look like the east-west streets were at least called "N. Fourth Street," etc., so conversations like these may not have been disastrous:

Enter two 19th century friends.
"Let us meet again next Saturday!"
"Yes! On the corner of First Street and Second Street at four o'clock?"
"Indeed! 'Til then!"
... and they never saw each other again because Williamsburgh's street naming system was, sadly, ludicrous.

'Til next time,
Meryl