The NYG&B's eLibrary is powered by Findmypast, which provides all NYG&B members access to millions of records, including census, vital, religous, and immigration records from the United States and Canada. You can learn more about Findmypast's collections through the Getting Started section of their website. You can also view a variety of tutorials and webinars produced by the NYG&B and Findmypast that detail how tips and tricks when using the NYG&B eLibrary and other Findmypast collections.
You can access the NYG&B eLibrary at Findmypast directly from our website as well as individual pages for each collection.
Important things to know:
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Many items within the eLibrary are best viewed with Adobe Reader (you can download a free version online). Be sure to check your settings/plugins to ensure that Adobe Reader is enabled as your in-browser PDF reader.
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Best search results are often found using a full text search. Even when searching a name, it is best to use full text search, especially when searching a book or journal, such as The Record. Just using Findmypast's "Name" or "Who" search may miss names which are split between lines or pages.
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While Findmypast's name variant searches provide an important tool, they might not find all variants of a name. Thus, it is best to use a full text search for all names.
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For users of the old NYG&B eLibrary, some collection names might have been slightly adjusted. For example, Abstracts of Marriage and Death Records Flushing and Vicinity in the previous eLibrary is listed as New York, Flushing Marriage & Death Abstracts 1847-1870 on Findmypast. Most changes have been slight. To see a list of these changes, click here.
Accessing the Collections
On Findmypast, each individual collection page is set up in the same way. At the top of the page will be the collection title, with a brief description. Then will appear a gray search area (or an area to limit your choice, but not full-text search, in the case of browsable image-only collections). The bottom of the page will have more information about the collection, as well as a list of useful links and resources. Each gray search area will have specific functions tailored to the collection it serves. Please note that collections that contain handwritten materials that have not been transcribed will not be able to be full-text searched.
You may notice, that some collections have more than one listing on Findmypast. One will be labeled "searchable" and the other labeled "image browse."
If you wish to search a collection, please choose the search option. However, if you wish to read a particular item, for example an issue of The NYG&B Record or one of our digitized WPA publications, from cover to cover as though it were in your hands, choose the browse option.
Click on any of the collections on the homepage to be taken to the unique search screen for that particular collection. Please note, that image browse versions will have ways to limit your selection, for example you can pull up issues of The NYG&B Record only published in 1936, but will not be able to perform a full-text search.
Searching the Collections
- Use the full text search rather than the "Who" or "Name" search
The "Who" or "Name" search found at the top of many of the gray search areas will generally not yield successful search results. Because most of the material in the NYG&B eLibrary has been written out in sentences and paragraphs, the Name search engine will not always pick up on names written in lines of text. Instead, you can use the full text search any time you are looking for a word in the text, even if that word is a name.
- Properly select search terms
Some search fields will have "Browse ..." in blue at the end of the entry box. If you type in those search entry boxes, a green circle will begin to go around in the right hand corner of the entry box. In order to ensure that your search term is properly selected, you must select the highlighted blue entry that will appear below your entry, or alternately, click "Browse...." and select your search term, for example the number 125, if you are searching for a volume of The NYG&B Record. When a search term which has "Browse" at the end of its entry box is properly selected, it will appear in a bubble below the search entry box. Some users have found that for entering numbers, it can be faster to use the "Browse" feature, depending on your internet speeds.
Special Information for The NYG&B Record and the New York Researcher
The NYG&B Record and the New York Research both have searchable as well as image browse versions. The Useful Links and Resources section of their individual collections, will always show the image browse version, if you are in the searchable version, and vice-versa. Additionally, in the Useful Links and Resources section, you will find links to the indexes for those periodicals. You can also access indexes to these periodicals directly through the NYG&B - each page in our eLibrary also contains links to indexes.
For additional assistance, you can contact Findmypast's customer support or a member of the NYG&B team.
Please send comments, suggestions, and additions to webmaster@nygbs.org