Dear Genea-Santa, I've got some ideas for you

Dear Genea-Santa,

Everyone else wrote to you last week, but I've got a letter of a different sort. No requests, just a suggestion. Maybe you could get some institutions to work on it with you for next year.

Wouldn't it be fabulous if records repositories offered gift certificates?! I'm sure I'm not the only family historian to have the experience I've had this season. You're asked, "What do you want for Christmas?" And you simply can't think of anything you need. "But isn't there anything you'd like?" Well, there's great-great-grandma Mary King's death certificate, available at the NYC Department of Health . . . or Aunt Agnes's death certificate, which has to be ordered from Albany . . . or any of a dozen other records you know the location of, but haven't gotten your hands on yet. It's not quite the same as asking for a pair of boots from Nordstrom, or a jacket that has to be ordered from L.L.Bean. And you kind of get funny looks when you ask for them. (I know, because I tried it this year!)

But if there were a way to make hundred-year-old birth certificates available as gifts that lay people (you know, non-genealogists) could understand, maybe they'd take advantage of it, to our advantage! Genea-Santa, you're a genealogist. You understand the kind of excitement that would greet, say, a gift certificate good for 2 birth certificates and a death certificate from your local archives. What genealogist wouldn't love to pull out of his stocking a gift certificate for $50 towards marriage records from an ancestral village?

So work on that, Genea-Santa, because I know what I'd love to find under the tree next year!

Merry Christmas!

Love,

Katie