DORIS (NYC Department of Records and Information Services)

Photo by Catarina Carvalho on Unsplash

​For those of you who have ties to New York City, the Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS) has completed a digitization project which you will find helpful in your genealogy research. Let’s look.

The Department of Records and Information Services has made historical birth, death and marriage records available from the New York City Municipal Archives.
https://a860-historicalvitalrecords.nyc.gov/
 
They have a beta search available and with a little digging you can find this option after determining the borough you’d like to search and the timeframe. I was easily able to find a death certificate by searching for the last name and limiting the timeframe.
There are other records of death available, and I found this information by search for “death records”.
For example, a quick search for ‘death records’ brought up several documents plus delicious old volumes of death records from various dates. Here’s an example of the Death Record Volume 1884-1900 Death Ledger - Almshouse Ledger Collection (lunaimaging.com) While there is an option to search within the document or volume, I didn’t get that to work so if you know the approximate timeframe of your ancestor’s death, you can search page by page the old fashioned way. Depending on who was filling out the death record listing, you may find such things as the person’s name, age, place of birth, cause of death, name, and address of friend, where buried and where died. Like all records (or in the case of my ancestors) this information isn’t always complete. Here are a couple of screenshots to give you an idea of what this information looks like.

- Almshouse Ledger Collection (lunaimaging.com) https://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/media/book/showBook/NYCMA~2~2~84~477983

In addition to releasing these digital records, DORIS also has extensive photographs and historical information related to New York City which you may find useful as you write your stories. Kudos to this group. This appears to have been an enormous undertaking and I hope that you will have great luck finding information about your New York City ancestors! Happy Searching!