Oh, What a Wonderful World!

Sometimes I forget to be grateful for the wonders of the internet and today's capacity to obtain information.  And when I do forget, I get reminded the way I did this week.  What you see here is Lena Coffarelli's marriage certificate.  Lena was your grandfather James older sister (he was the youngest so they were all older, but that's another blog post) making her your Grand Aunt.  I found some Fierro names in your mother's address book which led me on this merry chase.  Notice that Elizabeth Coffarelli is one of the witnesses--she was one of Lena's older sisters.

So the "wonderful world" part of how I came to obtain this marriage certificate isn't the fact that I was able to find a record of Lena's marriage on one internet site then use another NYC government site to order it online without ever letting my coffee get cold.  Amazingly enough there's more wonderfulness to be grateful for.

My genealogical eye was looking for new information on this record when it arrived by old fashioned snail mail and I noticed right away that Lena's place of birth didn't look familiar to me.  If you look closely at it, perhaps you will see something similar to what I saw:  that she listed her place of birth as Sholden Island.  I had never heard of Sholden Island before so I jumped online and did an exact term search.

Bingo here comes the miracle--or nightmare depending on your point of view.  The Bing search for exact term Sholden Island returned sites for "Staten Island"--which made me do the dope slap to the forehead.  Of course, Staten Island makes so much more sense so I felt relieved that little mystery got solved so quickly.

But then I got thinking how did Bing "know" to return Staten Island results to me when I asked for Sholden Island????  A little bit scary even as grateful as I am for the easy avenue to the information.  It is, indeed, a wondrous world we live in.