Ancestry Wrapped: 70 Uploaded Items to Share

Ancestry.com has begun giving members a summary of their stats for the year, sort of similar to what Spotify Wrapped does for its listeners. 

Among the stats for me in 2025, this one jumped out: I uploaded 70 items to share with other researchers and relatives.

Most of these uploads were birth, marriage, and death certificates I downloaded from the New York City Municipal Archives Historical Vital Records databases. The vast majority of my ancestors came through Ellis Island and Castle Garden, often staying in the Big Apple to work, raise a family, and live out their lives.

My research was super-charged this year when the New York City Muni Archives finally introduced indexes to free (uncertified) digitized vital records. 

So when I'm looking at an ancestor who lived in New York City and I don't have all of their original vital records, I click over to the Muni site and try to locate a birth, marriage, or death record. Then I download the record and upload it to Ancestry, attaching it to the pertinent people on my family tree.

A great deal of info is on these documents: names of the ancestor, ancestor's parents, dates and places, and more. Scans of originals and in color too.

Importantly, these documents serve as proof of what I assert on my family tree. If, for example, someone wants to see why I named "X maiden name" as the mother of Y, they can look at the original birth record scan I uploaded. The Genealogical Proof Standard in action!

These uploads are also my way of showing appreciation for the kindness of relatives and family historians who added vital records scans to their family trees in the past.

Travel Tuesday: Which Immigrant Ancestors Saw the Statue of Liberty?

Recently I completed a 14-page "memory booklet" outlining the family histories of Henrietta Mahler (1881-1954) and Isaac Burk (1882-1943), my paternal grandparents.

I tried to get a sense of what it was like to be an immigrant arriving in steerage, getting my first glimpse of the city I hoped would have streets paved with gold.

Henrietta and her younger siblings were children when they arrived at New York's Castle Garden in late 1886, just around the time the Statue of Liberty was dedicated (on October 28, 1886).

However, Henrietta's father, Meyer Mahler, arrived in 1885, so his ship didn't pass Lady Liberty on the way to New York Harbor. Still, living in New York and awaiting his family's arrival, he would have been aware of the statue's purpose and the hoopla surrounding its dedication. Ken Burns has a wonderful timeline of the statue's history and the progress leading up to the dedication by President Grover Cleveland.

Henrietta's future husband, Isaac Burk, came to North America by way of Canada, and took a train south to the Vermont border, so he didn't see the Statue of Liberty on his incoming trip.

Both of my maternal grandparents arrived in the 20th century, which means their voyages ended with the Statue of Liberty in full view (and they were processed through Ellis Island, not Castle Garden). Minnie Farkas (1886-1964) sailed into New York Harbor in 1901, two years before Emma Lazarus's now-famous poem was inscribed on the base. Similarly, her future husband Theodore Schwartz (1887-1965) arrived in 1902, the year before the poem was put on the base. In later years, did they ever take a ferry to the statue to get a closer look?