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The New York Herald commenced publication in May 1835 and ran almost continuously for the next ninety years. As a newspaper at the heart of the most vibrant metropolitan area in the United States, its news features were of wide-ranging interest; its announcements of marriages and deaths equally so, for news about vital events in people's lives was a highly valued commodity in the age before advanced communications.

The first volume of this work (see Item 3670), which Mr. Maher compiled in 1987, indexed 38,000 death notices and 14,000 marriage notices--attesting to the Herald's extraordinary coverage of marriages and deaths. In the second volume (see Item 9220), which covers the eight years between 1856 and 1863, he added another 27,000 marriage entries and 97,000 death notices. This volume spans the period 1864-1870 and encompasses 42,240 additional marriages and a phenomenal 165,175 death notices, while the fourth and final volume brings the total number of notices abstracted to 52,850 marriages and 232,325 deaths.

Following the pattern established in the earlier volumes, the index is divided into two sections--one for marriages and one for deaths. The entries furnish the names of brides and grooms (or the late deceased) and the exact date of issue of the newspaper in which the original notice appeared. Scattered references to national and international personalities are not included, nor are periodic notices from the far western territories. Nevertheless, the extensive notices that are indexed, refer to people up and down the East Coast as well as to Midwesterners and persons from as far west as the State of California. At the back of the newest volume in the series, the researcher will find two useful appendices: (1) A list of veterans of the American Revolution whose death notices appeared in the New York Herald; and (2) A list of New York ministers and their churches in 1864/65, which may enable researchers to embellish the marriage and death data found in these volumes from church records.

This extraordinary work represents keys to further information--genealogical information otherwise well out of reach. Armed with this information, the researcher can go directly to microfilm copies of the newspaper for the complete data, or, alternatively, can request a computerized search from Mr. Maher's New York Herald database, details for which are given in the book. (Among other things, this database contains specific reference to the birthplace of 15,349 individuals of Irish origin, 2,849 Englishmen, 1,113 Scots, and 833 Germans.