June 1937 Thomas Jefferson High School Yearbook Now Online

I have finally been able to add another yearbook to my online searchable collection of Jefferson yearbooks, this one from June 1937. The graduating class numbered 764.

Thomas Jefferson High School is located in the East New York section of Brooklyn, New York. Jefferson was once (before World War II) one of the finest high schools in all of New York City. Especially during these times, due to the presence of many families of Jewish immigrants, a good percentage of the students were indeed Jewish.

You can either browse the yearbook cover to cover or do a search by graduate's name. There are now photographs of more than 47,000 graduates from seventy-four graduating classes. This represents sixty-five percent of all graduating classes from Jan 1927 (the first graduating class) to 2006. This is a great resource for Jewish genealogists, for those whose families once lived in this section of Brooklyn.

More yearbooks will be added in the future if and when they become available to the Museum.

New Montefiore Cemetery Searchable Database Now Fully Updated (More or Less)

This evening I checked the burial numbers per year for Pinelawn, New York's New Montefiore Cemetery and it seems that they have within the last day or so vastly updated their searchable database. Just three days ago the total burials online were more than 95,000; now the total number is nearing 149,000. Although we can assume that there will be tweaks to the database in the coming days etc., most of their burials should be online now. Not only are the New Montefiore burials for the 1990s and 2000s included now, but also for other years that were previously strangely underrepresented, e.g. 1936, 1954-6.

So now for those of you who became frustrated when you couldn't find your family member within their database, try again. Now I am just the messenger, so to speak, and don't represent the cemetery nor do I have anything to do with their database. If you think their is a misspelling or other mistake within their database, you must contact them directly. I'm just trying to keep you informed about newly formed searchable cemetery databases when I discover them.

I don't know if (Old) Montefiore Cemetery in Springfield Gardens, Queens, New York has been updated within the last couple of weeks or so since I first made the announcement about the Montefiore Cemetery databases. Besides a tweak here and there, I think the burial database for (Old) Montefiore Cemetery is mostly done, but I haven't fully checked it out yet and am not sure.

So to date, the Queens cemetery ("Old" Montefiore) has 133,402 burials online (more or less), and the Pinelawn cemetery has 148,704 for a total of 282,106.

So if you add this number to the number of NY metro cemetery burials that are currently online (along with Riverside and Mt. Moriah Cemeteries in New Jersey there are at least seven), there must be close to a million burial records available for searching, if not more (though one has to search each cemetery's online database individually.)

To search either of the Montefiore Cemetery databases, click here . Just click on the cemetery whose database you wish to search and then click on "Locator" at the top of the page.

Happy hunting!

NY's Montefiore Cemeteries: Two New Searchable Cemetery Databases

It seems that the organization that runs Montefiore Cemetery (St. Albans/Springfield Gardens, Queens County, NY) has redone their website which now includes a searchable database. It has done the same for its sister cemetery, New Montefiore, in Pinelawn, Suffolk County, NY. Just use the links below and click on the "Locator" link at the top of the page to begin searching. You should know that the databases have only been online for about two months. They still have plenty of burials to enter and there is still some tweaking to do, so be patient. Search now for people of interest, and if you can't find them on the database, try again at periodic intervals when the databases might be updated.

The searchable fields include first name and last name, month and year of death. The search results include first name, last name, age and date of death, grave location and society name.

Here are the links:

Montefiore Cemetery: www.montefiores.com/Montefiore/jewish-cemeteries-new-york/index.html.
New Montefiore Cemetery: www.montefiores.com/newMontefiore/jewish-cemeteries-new-york/index.html.

You might be better off using the link www.montefiores.com/index.html, and simply click on the photo of either cemetery office which will take you to the particular cemetery's website.

It should be noted that the folks who run these two cemeteries are not affiliated with the group who created the other six or seven Queens, NY cemetery databases, so the form of the cemetery databases are different. These two new databases are imperfect and are no doubt missing some burials, etc., but having access to them should make for some 'happy hunting.'

So have a go at it and good luck!

Knollwood Park Cemetery Burial Data Now Online

I noticed today that Mt. Carmel Cemetery (Glendale, Queens, New York), which has taken over supervision of the nearby cemetery Knollwood Park Cemetery(in Ridgewood), has finally put online the information about the Knollwood Park burials.

There are currently over 17,000 burials listed now and I am assuming that this is the current number of burials at the cemetery. You should be forewarned, however, that most of the dates of death, especially the deaths pre-2000, are not included. These dates are simply listed as 1/1/1900, which is the default date for the database. I have no idea why this happened or if it will be fixed in the future.

The Knollwood Park burials are listed as Cemetery Section 5 within Mt. Carmel's website. Sections 1 and 2 are of the main "old" Carmel Cemetery; Section 3 is of the New Carmel Cemetery (down the road), and Section 4 is of the (former) Hungarian Union Fields Cemetery. You can find the burial data for these five sections combined as one on the Mt. Carmel Cemetery site at www.mountcarmelcemetery.com . I imagine if you find a burial for Knollwood Park and would like to know the actual date of death for someone, you can telephone either Knollwood Park or Mt. Carmel; I'm not sure if one or the other or both have that information.