Metropolitan Diary

 Joyce Marcel. "Back in Time" (Metropolitan Diary), New York Times, March 14, 2021, p. 32.

I was doing research on an accident that happened in 1945, when I was 3 and living on 51st Street in Brooklyn....

A friend who is a former librarian and now does genealogy research contracted a librarian in Brooklyn and learned that the Brooklyn Public Library had digitized its telephone directories.

Within a day, I had the name of the family that had lived next door.  It was an unusual name, so I did a search online and found a Buddhist scholar who, to my surprise, lived in the Vermont town next to mine. 

I left the man a garbled, giddy phone message asking if, by any chance, he was related to a family that had once lived in that house on 51st street, which has since been torn down.  

The next day he called back to say that he was related to all of the people who had lived in the house and that the person I was looking for was his grandfather. 

COMMENT 

Even former librarians still have the impulse to help people find information.  The digitized phone books record a snapshot of people and businesses from the past.  Libraries used to have shelves full of them.