Tax Photos
I greatly enjoy your column in the Journal and thought other readers might enjoy a resource I found exciting.
 
I was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., as were my parents and grandparents. My great-grandparents lived in New York City thru 1935. I have assembled all their addresses over the years verified by birth, marriage, and death records, as well as census records. I had always thought it would be interesting to have a photo of each residence but the task seemed daunting.

One day, I came across the NYC Department of Records Tax Photographs program. New York City photographed each and every residence in all five boroughs in the late thirties and early forties and makes them available for purchase. I have purchased photographs for each address and now have a remarkable visual image of three generations of my family. Perhaps others of New York City origins would enjoy doing the same.

Norman B. Buckman
Ocean Grove, N.J.

Instead of Ibid…
The following “which ever” is a much better way to note sources in articles and books than using “ibids.”

Give a number to each book in the bibliography, either in a chapter bibliography or a master bibliography, one you use. When you want to show a source in a footnote or a superscript in a sentence, use the appropriate book number, then the page number.

For example, to source “The History of New England,” find the number you have given the book in the bibliography, then add the page number. If the book is #20, source it as [20:234] which means book #20, page no. 234. If it is more than one volume use [20:V.1:p234]

This way of showing a source saves lots of space. If several sources from that book are used it is easy to determine the name of the book, rather than having to search back to find the page the first “ibid”
is on.

Marjorie Gibson

Google Books Adds New Tool
Google Books has added a new section to its “About the Book” pages, called “Places Mentioned in this Book.”

You first have to conduct your search at http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search and select a specific title.

To find the Places Mentioned map:
1) If the Summary section is in a separate column at the right (which it will be if the reference is to a page within a book), click on “More about this book” and scroll down to the map.
2) If the Summary section displays all the way across the top (which it does when you have done a title search), just scroll down to the map.
 
Pretty neat! Try it and see what you think.
 
Dee Anna Grimsrud,
Reference Archivist, Wisconsin Historical Society
Madison, Wisconsin

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