Yearbook and some smalls

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The 1963 Hourglass is the yearbook from the Columbia School in Rochester. It was a private girl’s school except for the nursery school and kindergarten which had boys.  In 1963 the school was in a large house. It later merged with the Allendale school which only had boys. That is how we got the current Allendale Columbia School.

There were 30 girls in the senior class. I would bet that all of them went on to college.

There are color pictures of the Headmistress and her assistant.  Those are color photos glued onto the pages. That would have saved money rather than have color printed pages.

Also scanned last week was:

Hit Songs of 1976 – #14

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What was the first song to hit #1 with “disco” in the title? It was “Disco Lady” by Johnnie Taylor. It was the first single to be certified platinum (1 million sales) by the RIAA (those folks that sued everyone for illegally downloading music). It was on the top of the Billboard chart for 4 weeks (March 28 – April 24). It was only at #1 on the Cash Box chart for two weeks (April 4 – 17) but they named it their most popular song of 1976.

Johnnie Taylor had been around the music industry for quite a while before this song became popular. His biggest hit before “Disco Lady” was with “Who’s Making Love”  in 1968. But by the 1980s he ended up as a DJ on a radio station in Dallas. He still recorded albums up until about the year 1999 with moderate success. He died in 2000 at aged 66.

“Disco Lady” isn’t really a disco song. It is more of a R&B ballad.

NY Deaths Records You Will Never See

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I stumbled into this without thinking about what it would entail. My mother once said that she had a miscarriage before I was born. That would have been sometime in the late 1940s.

I asked about those kinds of records on the NY Genealogy group. I got replies from both Brooke Schreier Ganz and Alec Ferretti of Reclaim the Records. Both stated that when they asked for the NY Death Index that they did not want those records. Alex also stated that there is probably a completely separate index to miscarriages and still births.

I found this web page from the NY Department of Health. They have two classes on that web page; Fetal Death (miscarriage) and Still Birth. They say that “A still birth is the death of a fetus after 20 weeks of gestation.” That would be the current standard. In the past that time period could have been less or greater.

The Dept. of Health has different standards for who can order the records. For the Fetal Death Certificate only the mother can order a copy of the certificate. For the Still Birth either parent can order the certificate or if both parents are deceased then a grandparent or sibling could submit an order but they have to certified that both parents are deceased.

One genealogical researcher says that she has found some stillbirths in the birth and/or death indexes that are currently available online from various sources. I would imagine that those came about because, in the past, a doctor filed a standard death certificate instead of a special one that should have been filed for a still birth.

I did a search on the new Reclaim the Records The New York State Death Index web page but just putting “SB” in the first name field. I got about 250 records with “SB” as a first name and another 300 records had a child with a first name plus “SB.”

There are a couple of states that have made their still birth index available but I doubt that New York State will ever make this special index available. In part because  a small percentage of these records could include abortions which for the most part were historically illegal but could have been done to protect the health of the mother.

Not Much

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I didn’t scan much last week. The biggest thing that I scanned was Jell-O Pudding Ideabook. It is from 1968 and has recipes using Jell-O Pudding and Pie Filling. It is not Monroe County history so the link will take you to the Internet Archive. Jell-O originated in LeRoy, Livingston County, NY in 1897.

There are other Jell-O recipes on the Internet Archive. I uploaded this one from 1905 many years ago. Then two years ago I uploaded three more Jell-O recipe books (from 1916, 1927, and 1932).

Then I scanned two new postcards; the Rose Window of Asbury First Methodist Church (on the right) and the interior of the former Annunciation Catholic Church (now Bridge Builders Ministries).

I spent some time last week going through old family movies. I don’t have a projector any more but I have an old film editor with a 2 inch screen that has to be hand-cranked. I ended up taking about 1000 film of 8mm movies to Scott’s Photo to have digitized onto a DVD. I can convert the DVD to other digital formats.

I did some full text searches on FamilySearch. Found out my 3rd great grandfather, Rufus Halsey, was a Constable in 1822 and 1823 in the Town of Howard, Steuben County. At that time there were about 1000 people in that Town. He died in 1826 at age 45 leaving a widow and 7 children.

I did some spring cleaning, at least inside. Still have some big jobs to do outside when the weather stays warmer.