Today I received an email from John Martino, the Project Coordinator for the Italian Genealogy Group  (IGG) that “Ancestry has made arrangements with New York City Municipal Archives to link to their vital records….This was done to promote the records and make them available to more genealogists then we could ever do.  Isn’t that why we took on this task?  We all wanted to help our fellow researchers… Ancestry will not have the actual certificates.  Researchers will have to contact the Municipal Archives to get copies of the certificates.”

I am very proud to have been one of the thousands of volunteers who worked on many of these projects.  The Italian Genealogy Group has done amazing work over the years transcribing and indexing record collections held at local and regional archives.     The full story can be read in the Long Island Newsday, January 16, 2014, page A8.