The Department of Records and Information Services launched Historical Vital Records of NYC this week. The site features more than nine million birth, death and marriage records, all freely available to browse, search and download. In less than 24 hours after the launch, people from across the globe—in Europe, United Kingdom, Australia, China, New Zealand, Argentina, Jamaica, Hong Kong, Fiji—to name just a few places, visited the site.   

The Municipal Archives has always endeavored to use advances in technology to expand and facilitate access to its vast holdings. About ten years ago, DORIS leadership began promoting the benefits of digitizing the historical vital record collection. Their arguments were persuasive and funding was made available beginning in 2013.    

It was an incredibly layered undertaking that involved setting up the financial, physical and digital infrastructures to support the long-term project. In the first phase, Assistant Commissioner Kenneth Cobb procured contracts with eDocNY, a New York State Industries for the Disabled vendor, to digitize the records. Cobb led a team of technologists, database managers, digitization technicians, metadata creators, collections managers, preservation and conservation staff, to ensure the project’s success. 

The vendor eDocNY produced excellent high-quality, full-color scans of the certificates—a vast improvement over the microfilmed images previously available. The digital image helped to improve accuracy in transcribing the records and provided another opportunity to engage with genealogy partners who, since 2003, had been indexing the collections from microfilmed and hard-copy sources.  

The next phase was to make the new digital records available to a broader audience.  In 2017, DORIS launched an application built by in-house developers that allowed reference staff to fulfill requests for vital-record copies more efficiently and accurately using the new color images. The vital-records application also provided onsite patrons with the ability to search and view the records. The “app” was a pivotal steppingstone.    

Once the digitization project with eDocNY successfully digitized more than eight million records, DORIS pivoted to digitizing the Marriage License series in-house. Over the past several years more than one-million records have been digitized, preserved, and made available. The project was interrupted during the pandemic and picked up again in August, 2021. This work is on-going.  

Further, City archivist Patricia Glowinski has begun working on a comprehensive guide to the New York City vital records, documenting records created and/or maintained by the City of New York, and vital records created and/or maintained by municipalities that were once located within the boundaries of the present-day five Boroughs that were dissolved or annexed before 1898. The collection includes birth, marriage, and death registers, certificates, and indexes, and marriage licenses, 1760-1949 (with gaps).

The agency’s application development team tested a variety of open-source approaches to making the vital records available in a timeframe that internet users expect. They built a robust, secure, easy-to-use platform, capable of handling a large volume of users simultaneously. As a result, on day one, more than 25,000 users accessed the site and downloaded 12,000 records.   

With each step, access to the collections increases, and the Municipal Archives continues to build and sustain industry-standard plans to manage the physical and digital collections, and the associated descriptions that provide access points. It is to the credit and expertise of archivists, conservators, and reference and research professionals at the New York City Municipal Library and Archives, that these collections will survive for future generations, and continue to enrich the research experience of people and communities around the world.   

Stay tuned for more announcements!