Wedding certificate for Georg Harms and Meta née Kastens I need a miracle. I have the 1883 wedding license of my 2x great-grandparents — the first of my father’s bloodline in America. City records said the records are rather damaged and the result is below. I’m trying to make out the place of birth. It looks like: Cesck Sieke, Hau(e)r Uh, never heard of that place. I have no idea where to go with this. In later censuses both report being from Germany. Can any of you make out the place? I’ll be doing some computer pattern matching searches to try to find a winner, but was wondering if you could help.

http://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/s/45j4ov My grandfather’s house in 1940. He lived here with his two sisters, his brother-in-law and his parents. This is out on 120th street in Queens.

http://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/s/76d7sl 94 S 3rd Street, Williamsburg(h), Brooklyn, NY This is probably the building that my great-great-great-grandmother helped run with her husband John Meyer. A blended family, she raised his 3 kids with her 1 (George Martin Harms) by her first marriage (ended with George D. Harms’ death from pneumonia). Records show that the grocery was in the ground floor with the family living upstairs. Later, as Meyer retired, he turned it into a saloon. Meyer died in 1927 and the building was used as (evidently) a luncheonette and deli. It’s been scraped and rebuilt since and is now a preschool for Spanish-speaking kids.

I recently learned that the NYC Department of Records had put their tax photos from 1940 online.

I thought I’d look up some of my family’s old pre-war residences and see what we could find. I found the site of my great-great-great grandmother’s shop in Williamsburg(h) and the house my grandfather dwelt in in 1940.