At G.C. library, club members find ancestors

Have you ever wondered about your ancestry, or the history of your home? Sometimes oral stories aren’t reliable, and not every household can keep records, photos and documents. To help residents take a deeper dive into their history, the Glen Cove Public Library’s Genealogy Club held its first meeting on Jan. 24.
“It’s really just like a place where people come to bring their work, talk amongst each other, encourage each other,” archivist and librarian Lydia Wen Rodgers said. “It’s a community.”
One component of the club is the Genealogy Collective, a collaboration of North Shore libraries that will meet on Zoom. The collective’s librarians, genealogists, historians and authors plan to give virtual lectures on the resources and history available to residents to help them explore their roots. Topics included Latin American, Italian and African American genealogy, reflecting the diverse population of Glen Cove and the rest of the North Shore.
The collective will have its first virtual meeting on Feb. 10. The libraries working to host the events are in Glen Cove, Bayville, Oyster Bay, Locust Valley and Glen Head. “We’re stronger if we work with other people,” Rodgers said.
Ancestry.com and similar websites have helped many people trace their family trees. The Glen Cove library’s Ancestry.com membership was canceled two years ago due to budget cuts, but Rodgers said she hoped that renewing the subscription to the website with the help of a grant would encourage community members to visit and use it.

Genealogy Club meetings are limited to five participants, and are held in the library’s history room. On Jan. 24, attendees were eager to share their stories, and offered one another tips for deepening their research.
Mercedes Morales, a library trustee, is a first-generation Puerto Rican whose family members are lifelong residents of Glen Cove. She was looking to find more information on her family before they immigrated to the U.S., which she hopes to someday share them with her grandson.
Steven Boerner, an archivist from Locust Valley, came to the meeting because he will be the presenter at a meeting of the collective in October. He shared the results of his efforts to track his lineage. Ancestors on his mother’s side, Boerner said, helped found the city of Hartford, Conn., and he discovered that a Capt. Jacob Prickett, who fought in the Revolutionary War, was a distant relative. “There’s a lot out there,” Boerner said. “We only just scratched the surface.”
During the coronavirus pandemic, Boerner created a Facebook group to connect with lost family members. The library’s new club, he said, will help him continue his search and share his findings. “I think it’s great,” he said, adding of the information it will help him uncover, “They made it very accessible.”
Peggy Nieri, of Glen Cove, has been trying to learn more about her mother’s genealogy. Her family didn’t keep many records, so she was excited to discover some of its history at the library.
“I can’t wait to get on the computer to start looking at my ancestors and find out where they came from,” Nieri said. “People don’t know where they come from. I never thought about it when my family was alive, and now it’s interesting to me.”
“People can bring in [research] they’ve already done, whether they did it themselves or somebody else has done it,” Rodgers said. “Or they can bring in nothing and they can be completely a beginner. The idea is that people will come and kind of share with each other.”
The next meeting of the club will be on Feb. 28, at 7 p.m., at the library.