How this archive was built
Every record on this site was assembled from public, digitized archives. Nothing here is invented. Where the historical record is garbled or uncertain, it is marked as such. These are the collections it draws on.
The bulk of this archive — every marriage, every birth, every dated page — comes from the Brooklyn Public Library's digitized newspaper collection, hosted at bklyn.newspapers.com. More than 33,000 newspaper pages mentioning Windsor Place or Windsor Terrace were catalogued; 121 marriage notices and 51 birth notices were transcribed in full. Records are searched through the library's public interface.
bklyn.newspapers.com →Ten Brooklyn papers carried Windsor Place and Windsor Terrace into print between the 1850s and the 1960s. Page counts below reflect how many digitized pages mention the neighborhood by name.
For context beyond the newspapers, this archive draws on published histories and civic records held by the Library of Congress, all freely available in digital form.
A budget of general information on the city and county — the earliest reference work consulted.
A statistical and descriptive handbook of Brooklyn just as Prospect Park was being completed.
A social register of the era; context for who was marrying whom.
A local history of the town of Flatbush, of which Windsor Terrace was once a part.
Subtitled “Cradle Days of Brooklyn.” Its street-name etymology section records that Windsor Place was named after the Windsor Terrace neighborhood — “so named by Robert Bell.”
A roster of Brooklyn and Long Island servicemen in the First World War, organized by unit and home address.
The Sanborn Map Company surveyed American cities block by block for fire insurers, recording the footprint, height, and construction material of every building. The Library of Congress holds the Brooklyn volumes. These show Windsor Place house by house as it was built out — brick versus frame, the stables, the corner stores.