Hi Robert, I am glad to hear that you had good experiences. I always have had helpful clerks. But most important, you said so. Too often we are anxious to tell our hprror stories and not our good stories. I am guilty of the same thing, except that I have had few bad experiences, so generally say nothing. In the future I will try to give appropriate creidt to all those helpful clerks, librarians, and people in general. BarbaraA Barbara L. de Mare, Esq. Historian, genealogist and attorney 155 Polifly Road Hackensack, New Jersey 07601 (201) 567-9440 office BarbaradeMare@yahoo.com (home) http://historygenealogyesq.blogspot.com/ ----- Original Message ---- From: Robert Locke <gen-lists@ralii.com> To: nywestch@rootsweb.com Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2007 8:27:53 PM Subject: [NYWESTCH] Woes and Joys of I must admit that being a researcher who has done all of his research in New England, New York has always made me nervous. For one, the whole city/town/village thing is a challenge. I spent today in search of four death certificates. One was reportedly to be found in Harrison and the other three in Scarsdale. I arrived in Harrison armed with my grandmother's statement that her mother, while buried in Greenwich, CT, had died in Harrison while residing in a nursing home. Now, I know we are great at complaining about Town Clerks, but let me just say, that the people in Harrison went WAY ABOVE AND BEYOND in helping me today. Perhaps I got them on a good day, but they, first gave me an education on where death records end up. Apparently, depending on whether someone died at home, on the street, in a nursing home, transferred to a hospital before death, the event could be recorded in one of several different locales. After discovering that this was not going to be simple, the clerks in Harrison ended up calling five other "jurisdictions", where, in each case, the clerk in that locale checked for my great-grandmother's death. After a quick phone call on my part to my mother to confirm the nursing home: the Osburn, literally around the corner from the Harrison Municipal Building, we find that the death is recorded in the "City" of Rye, not the village or town of Rye. So, thanks to the enormous efforts and education from the clerks in Harrison, and a quick drive over to Rye, I had success in a single morning now holding, my great-grandmother, May Harper Ford's death certificate.... Next, I was off to Scarsdale in search of my great-great-grandparents death certificates, and my 3G-grandmother. They were from the years 1895 (Lorena Lindsley (VanCourt) Harper), 1900 (Eliza Ann (Lowry) Harper) and 1917 (Joseph Alexander Harper). Again, the people in Scarsdale could not have been nicer, but, this time I had less success. It turns out that Scarsdale no longer has (or perhaps never had) marriage and death records from 1880 through 1909. They have birth records for the span of time. So I was only able to find the death certificate of my great-great-grandfather, Joseph Alexander Harper, but not his wife Lorena nor his mother Eliza. I did find and view cemetery records maintained at the Reformed Church in Cortlandtown (which pointed me to Scarsdale, as location of death), but there were no "referral" death certificates located in the Town of Cortlandt (I had checked there yesterday). So, one point of this note is to post a thank you to the clerks that I met this day. The second point is to see if anyone has any advice on my stumbling in Scarsdale.... Does anyone know about this date range appearing in state records perhaps? Did some other jurisdiction walk off with the book from Scarsdale? Was there some "disaster" in Scarsdale that destroyed these records? Curiosity is getting to me this evening.... Thanks in advance for any advice, and happy hunting! --Rob -- Robert Locke Vice President, Webmaster, Connecticut Ancestry Society, Inc., http://www.rootsweb.com/~ctcas Treasurer, Acting Webmaster, Locke Family Association, http://lockefamilyassociation.org My Genealogy, http://www.ralii.com/genealogy *************************************** Have you checked out the Westchester County GenWeb site yet? http://www.rootsweb.com/~nywestch/ *************************************** ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to NYWESTCH-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message