Dear Friends, Yesterday I transcribed Mary JOHNSON's death certificate at NYC Municipal Archives, for a friend who *thought* it might be her Irish-Catholic ancestor. Mary was African-American, hailed from Connecticut, and was not my friend's family. Will someone repost it on a CT mailing list? This is one example of why searcher's can't assume that a name from a death index is an ancestor. Remember folks, you are dealing with New York City...historically the American port that processed the most immigrants. Millions! Immigrants who evacuated their homelands to merely survive. Immigrants who escaped starvation from an Irish potato blight, or a Russian Czar, or another Germanic war, or Armenian genocide, or the Italian eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Once you have different cultures living together, you have inter marriage, then surnames that no longer resemble the original immigrants of 1830. With a city as historically rich as New York still is, it was altered by the thousands even in route to settle in other places. This is all to say that: You can't judge a surname by it's index. Barb