Stacy & Kyes Store ledger Rushford, Allegany County New York

I have an old ledger book from the Stacy & Kyes store in Rushford, Allegany County New York which lists sales of goods (and who bought them!) from 1868 to 1872. The Gazetteer and Business Directory Of Allegany County, N.Y. for 1875 lists a Wm. E. Kyes as a seller of dry goods, groceries, boots, shoes, hats, caps, crockery etc., on Main Street in Rushford.

Stacy and Kyes sold drugs, paints, books, groceries and just about everything else you can think of. For example, in May 1868 we find Albert Woods. Albert came into the store every day over a period of 10 days, each time buying one item. On May 12th he bought crackers for 16 cents. May 13th he returned and bought 3 lb of sugar for 78cents. Over the next few days he bought a fourth of tobacco for 25 cents, a 1/2 lb. of tea, and 95 cents worth of groceries.

A few days later Albert returned for more tobacco! Albert's wife may have been baking for the very next day he bought a sack of flour for $3.30. July saw Albert buying oil - one gallon for 60 cents. In August he bought alcohol for 56 cents and a couple of days later another sack of flour. I wonder if there was a reunion or party planned? Over a time period of 3 months Albert spent $10.75 total at the store.

The index pages from the Stacy & Kyes Store ledger have been scanned and put online on AncestorsAtRest.com.

National Archives to Open Official Personnel Files of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)

The National Archives will open more than 35,000 official personnel files of men and women who served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which was the U.S. wartime intelligence agency during World War II.

The files cover civilian and military personnel who served and were later transferred, discharged, reassigned, or died while in service prior to 1947.

The 750,000 pages include initial applications to join the OSS; preliminary training and subsequent work assignments; pay, leave and travel documents; evaluations, basic medical information; and awards, decorations and discharge papers. Occasionally, photographs are included in the application file. Senior officials, officers and men engaged in special combat actions, such as Detachment 101, Jedburghs, X-2, espionage, and major intelligence missions may have citations summarizing those efforts in the files.

Some of the notables who were in the OSS include former CIA directors Allen Dulles and William Casey, famed chef Julia Child, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, Arab/Israeli peace negotiator and civil rights advocate Ralph Bunche, and Hollywood actor Sterling Hayden

What a treasure trove this will be for genealogists! And now you can start by searching for individuals who served in the OSS online in the Archival Research Catalog (ARC) listing for the OSS Personnel Files, ARC ID: 1593270.

Organizing and Remembering Passwords

I've been thinking a lot about passwords. It seems more and more websites require a login (username and password) to use their facilities. Of course as genealogists many of us already belong to subscription websites like Ancestry.com, Footnote.com, Genealogy Today and so on - all of which require a login. Google mail and other mail services need a password. Online banking is also password protected as are E-Bay and other auction sites.

We all learn pretty quickly that it is not a good idea to have one password for all our important or private areas of the internet. Instead we are urged to create separate passwords for every spot we visit. We're also urged to not record these passwords, but at the same time, told to guard them carefully and not forget them!

As my password list began to grow (and being the webmaster of over a dozen sites as well as volunteer list admin of dozens of mailing lists and message boards) just adds to that list!) I realized I had to come up with a method that would allow me quick and easy access to my safe-guarded areas.

My husband uses post-it notes. They are stuck all over his desk shelves. For me that doesn't work as it takes too long to find the one I want. Plus I don't like the clutter and the fact that anyone coming into our computer area has easy access to our "stuff".

I tried writing mine in an address book. Nope, I didn't like it as I couldn't keep the sites in alphabetical order within the letter category. I also ran out of room under one letter and had to expand into a letter that was incorrect. For someone with only a few passwords this might be a viable option but not for me

In desperation I bought Digital Personal Password Manager. It's a cool little device that you hook up to your computer. Then you teach it your fingerprint and your passwords. Whenever you go to a password protected site that you have "entered" on the device, you simply press your finger or thumb on the red pad and bingo your password is entered on the site and you are in.

At first I liked this method but I quickly began having problems. many times the fingerprint reader would not accept my finger! I had to move it, adjusting it ever so slightly, rolling it one way and another until it would take. My husband loves his, it works like a charm every time! But for me it was a dismal failure.

[Photo on left is an invented password and username, it's not the real one!] Finally last year I hit on what for me works beautifully. I use a roladex. The roladex allows me to create one card for each site. I can make changes as needed, I can change my password, record what credit card I used to buy a subscription, etc. I can buy extra roladex cards if I need more. I can insert a card so that the sites are in alphabetical order. When a card gets too full of scribbled notations, I can toss it and start a new one!

I'm the Roladex Queen now and I can't say enough about how much easier my online life is since I started using it.

What do my Grandma, Eaton's Department Store, William Massey and American Express have in common?

As a child I never experienced going to stores. We lived in a village where the only store was a tiny variety store which sold a bit of everything.

My mother didn't take her children with her when she shopped, so it was not until age 10 that I experienced a store for the first time. My grandmother took me to "The City" (Toronto) to Eaton's Department Store. Timothy Eaton founded a dry goods store on Yonge Street in 1869, and that small shop ultimately became the largest department store chain in the country. Timothy Eaton's first store was occupied by the 20th Century by Eaton's large Main Store, the Eaton's Annex and a number of related mail order and factory buildings. Eaton's is now defunct and where the huge store once stood is a large mall called The Eaton Centre. It is the 3rd largest shopping mall in Canada, and an important Toronto Tourist attraction.

For me, as a 10 year old, a trip to "The City" was an adventure on its own, as the only time I ever went there was our family's annual trip to the Santa Claus parade in downtown Toronto every November. The number of people in Eaton's overwhelmed me and I don't remember much about the store itself! I was impressed, but scared, as I rode on an escalator for the first time. I'd never seen a store with more than one floor or taking up so much space so it felt very alien to me and definitely outside my comfort zone. I do remember how lovely my grandmother looked in her skirt and jacket, nylons and high heels. And I chuckle at the thought of seeing someone dressed that way in any store now!

But what do Timothy Eaton, William Massey and American Express have in common? In a convoluted, six degrees of separation kind of thing, Timothy Eaton, the founder of Eaton's Department Store, moved to the town of St. Mary's Ontario in the 1860s and opened a small store. St. Mary's was a very small town and my husband's 3rd great-grandfather William Massey also lived there.

William, a teamster, worked for the newly formed American Express Company which had an office in St. Mary's in the mid 1800s. In 1862 William was charged with stealing over $800.00 from the Company (approximately $20,000.00 now) and arraigned for trial. One of the jurors at his arraignment was non other than Timothy Eaton!

One Step Search Engine for 1881 Canada Census

Steve Morse has uploaded a One-Step form for the 1881 Canadian census. It's in the Canadian Census section of http://www.stevemorse.org/

One advantage of Steve's form is that the district and subdistricts can be selected from a drop-down list rather than requiring the user to type them in and possibly
misspelling them.

BFF (Blogging Friends Forever) Award

Kathryn Hogan of Looking4Ancestors just passed me the BFF (Blogging Friends Forever) Award.

The rules of passing this award on are:

* Only 5 people are allowed to receive this award
* 4 of them followers of your blog.
* One has to be new to your blog and live in another part of the world.
* You must link back to who ever gave you the award.

The BFF Award is a cool idea, it's an interesting variation on the TAG game played last year amongst genealogy bloggers. In that TAG, you had to write about 5 things that were not generally known about you.

The problem I have with the rules of this Award is figuring out who is new to my blog and where they live. So I figure I'll bend the rules slightly and find someone whose blog is new to me. With the new surge of Genealogy Bloggers coming on to Facebook and joining Genea-Bloggers Group, that part will be easy.

There are so many terrific new (and old!) blogs out there and I just haven't had the time to read them all. Two that recently came to my attention is Janet Hovorka's The Chart Chick and M. Diane Roger's CanadaGenealogy, or,'Jane's Your Aunt'. So I'm passing on this BFF Award to Janet & M. Diane as two of my five.

After much deliberation (and because it's difficult to find someone who hasn't already received the BFF Award!) I'm passing on one of the three remaining to Thomas MacEntee's Cooking Blog And I Helped! Thomas already has a BFF for his genealogy blog and I really enjoy his writing and his recipes on his Cooking Blog.

With two more to go, I decided to pass the BFF Award on to my friends Illya D'Addezio of GenealogyToday.com for his Genealogy News Center and Kathi Reid of Ancestor Search

Keep on Blogging!

Genealogy Crossword Puzzles and Games

Ali and Lilith come for their annual week on Grandma and Grandpa's farm soon. Since Ali, age 10, is our budding next-generation genealogist and Lilith is interested in ancestor stories, I always like to have a genealogy activity ready for them.

Last year I organized a very successful Ancestor Cemetery Hunt. This year we'll repeat that at a different cemetery but I wanted something more sedentary, something we could work on together but inside.

After hunting around the 'net for Genealogy crossword puzzles or word searches, I gave up and created my own. This is an image of part of the Genealogy Word Search I created. It's pretty easy, just make a list of genealogy related words and start putting them into an Excel page.

Next add letters randomly in the empty squares. In this photo I left the Genealogy words bolded for my answer sheet. In the final Word Search page I printed for the grandchildren, all letters are the same non-bolded look.

The Genealogy Crossword puzzle is not proving as easy to create. It was pretty easy to come up with the puzzle and the clues (definitions). However trying to add the superscript numbers in Excel didn't work for me. Trying to do this in Word also did not work. The image on the left shows my first draft attempt. Some numbers are superscript, some are normal. I could not get them to set to superscript! I would of course resize the boxes to be equal sizes, and black in all the unused squares before printing this off. This was to be my answer sheet, the final Crossword puzzle would have empty squares to be filled in.

I could add the numbers by hand and that is likely what I'll end up doing. Because when all is said and done, I only have so much patience. If anyone knows how I can create nice little superscript numbers, please post details here and save me from tearing my hair out!

1881 Canada Census IMAGES now online

Library & Archives Canada has just put the images for the 1881 Canada Census online. The census is fully searchable and you can view the page for any ancestor name you are interested in.

I found the online images impossible to read and could not see a method of enlarging them but it is easy to save to your hard drive. Then simply open in any graphic program and enlarge to a size that suits you. See AllCensusRecords.com for more census records online

Creating a Genealogy Family Memory Book, Part 2

This is one page from another of my Family Memory Books. It is the start of the section on my son's grandfather Jack and I wanted to show the different looks you can achieve.

Since I have Jack's old British passport I thought it would be a good idea to scan and place it in this Memory Book for my son and his children. I also included on this page a photo of Jack as a choir boy, the death certificate of his father, and a treasured photo of Jack in the streets of London England in WW11.

I use a very old program called Microsoft Picture It! Publishing 2001. There may well be much better and fancier ones available. But mine suits my purposes and allows me to create fancy or coloured backgrounds, fancy borders, edge effects, fade out effects and much more. Best of all, you can play around with the photos and documents right in the program. So you can change your layout and text and see exactly how it will look before you print. You can also save it as a webpage or email it to someone else.

This second image shows the same page but with a few changes. Here I created a fancy border around the photo of Jack as a choir boy. I also created a soft blurred edge effect around the top left photo of Jack in London England during WW11. Lastly I created a sepia background on which to place the photos. The choices are endless!

My first few Memory Books were plain and simple. I just wanted to place the images in a manner that was pleasing to me but I wanted to do them quickly. The more pages I created, the more I liked what was happening! I began to slow down and experiment.

Another thing I really like about Picture It! is that you can create 50 pages in the project, and you can place your images in the tray while you arrange and rearrange to your heart's content. It's rather like rearranging the living room but you don't have your husband complaining about moving the piano to seven different spots until you find the right place!

Creating a Genealogy Family Memory Book

Last winter I began scanning my old family photos and slides. As unofficial keeper of the family documents and photographs, I am entrusted with such treasures whenever someone dies. After years of accumulation of these items,including an old photo album from my grandmother's brother's family, I decided I simply had to organize and preserve them.

Scanning was my first step and I joined Scanfest, a monthly session hosted by Miriam of AnceStories: The Stories of My Ancestors. We get together on Windows Live Messenger where we scan and chat, and share tips on working out problems with old documents and photos. It's a great way to help motivate me to scan for a few hours while having fun!

Once I had all one family treasures scanned, I began scanning various documents I'd gathered in my genealogical research on that family. Scanning complete, I began editing the scans - cropping, resizing, correcting darkness and light problems and so on.

As soon as I had everything complete for one family I decided to create what I call a Family Memory Book. I eventually want to do one for each family line I have photos and documents for, but for now I worked on my English side - my mother and her parents going back as far as I have photographs. I have a page for each family member for whom I have a photo. Some individuals have many pages as I have a lot of photos and documents for them. Some have only 1 page, others share a page with other family members. It isn't a family tree so does not have to be in any particular order. As long as I labelled each photo, everyone can be identified by comparing names to a chart of the family tree which is included as one of the first pages of the book.

The photo at left is an example of one page from this 40 page booklet on my mother's English lines. This page holds a photo of my mother and her sister at very young ages, my mother's original birth certificate and a group photo of her at a young age with her parents and older sister. The group photo is actually a photocopy of an original and had to be seriously edited after scanning as photocopies are never a good solution. Sadly it was all I had to work with as no one knows who had the original or where it is now. (As an interesting aside, the young boy standing in the group photo was the son of family friends. The family lost touch but he became my mother's second husband some 65 years after this photo was taken.)

In this Family Memory Book I have scanned and placed photos, birth records, death records, newspaper obituaries, postcards of the ship my grandparents sailed on from England to canada in 1914, copies of ships passenger lists and any other documents I found when researching the lineage.

Because I have many family heirlooms passed on to me by my English grandmother, I also took pictures of them and included those in the Memory Book. This page is my Grandfather Charles in the Kent Buffs, and his gold pocket watch and initialed signet ring which my Grandmother gave me.

Each photo in the book has a caption or explanation with it. The progam I am using allows me to stack the photos as if I were creating a scrapbook. I can overlap. I can resize the photos right on the page so that I can see how the page will look. I can create borders. The choices are endless!

When this Family Memory Book is complete I will print them off on top quality laser paper, create a front and back cover which I will laminate, then I'll give one to each of my siblings and other family members. What better way to share the wonderful photos I own plus preserve copies in case anything happens to the originals.

Another Not-So-Famous Ancestor of Sorts

I'm still thinking about connections in History and Genealogy. About 6 degrees of separation.... Sometimes we have more details on an ancestor's life and can do more than play the "I wonder if..." game.

For example, my step-father (an Ancestor of sorts?) was first married to a woman who was one of Sir Frederick Banting's lab assistants.

Frederick Banting was a Canadian medical scientist, doctor and Nobel laureate, also the discoverer of insulin. Banting also painted with A. Y. Jackson of the famous Group of Seven artists who revolutionized Canadian art. Banting and Jackson took several painting trips together out west and up to the Artic.

In 1921 Banting began his research at University of Toronto which would lead to the discovery of insulin which was later used in the treatment of diabetes. In 1923 Banting received the Nobel Prize for Medicine. In 1934 Banting was knighted by the King for his work in the field of medicine.

Greta, my step-father's first wife, worked with Banting at his University of Toronto Lab. When Greta married my step-father (as his first wife) Banting attended the wedding and gave the young couple a painting he had done on a painting trip with A. Y. Jackson to Alberta in 1924.

After Banting's death in 1943 in a plane crash, the Wedding Gift painting was one of several displayed at an art exhibit of Banting's known works of art in Hart House, University of Toronto. For many years the Wedding Gift painting hung on the wall of my step-father's home in Ontario and then British Columbia. It bounced along in the back of a van driven by my mother across the Rocky Mountains from British Columbia back to Ontario in the 1980s, after my step-father's death.

The painting came full circle and was placed in storage until a decision was made about its future. What stories it could tell!

And so, in a convoluted way, I have an ancestor-of-sorts who is not-so-famous but was connected by his wife (also not-so-famous) to a rather famous and important person who himself was connected to a very famous-and-important person in the art world. And what fun to think about possible times they may have spent together.

This is the kind of connection to history story that I believe belongs in a personal genealogy journal. Perhaps one day, a hundred years from now, a descendant will read the story and feel connected to his or her past in a way that is not possible to achieve from simply reading a name on a census record.

Connecting Genealogy With History

A lot of the fun of genealogy is finding details beyond names, dates and locations. What is more thrilling than discovering an obituary for an ancestor where we learn that Great Grandma Susan was an avid quilt-maker, went to church every Sunday and enjoyed her roses in the garden. Or that Great Great Grandpa Daniel loved his Dandelion Wine and was known to imbibe a bit too much on occasion.

Not everyone has a famous ancestor. In fact, most of us have ancestors who were hard-working men and women with little time to do much more than survive! So often the details of their daily lives are sketchy. If we are lucky enough to find a journal or diary that survived, we count our blessings and move on. Most of us will never be that lucky and so we have many ancestors who will remain a blur, a shadowy outline on our famiily tree.

But what about paths that cross in history? Have you ever considered looking beyond your direct ancestor to see who else may have connected with them during their lifetime?

For example, my grandmother McGinnis lived on Water Street in Guelph Ontario Canada, for much of her life. I have proof of that from census, family records, cemetery and burial records and so on. I remember going to her home as a child but hadn't seen it in years so I decided to take a trip to Guelph to see how many of the homes of my ancestors remained.

As we drove down Water Street, I saw a Historic Plaque for the home of John McCrae (1872-1918), the Canadian Physician and poet who wrote "In Flanders Fields"

Grandma lived only 2 houses away. The thought flashed through my mind - I wonder if he and Grandma knew each other? Did they pass on the street and nod hello with a cheery "Good morning!"? Grandma McGinnis was born in 1880, she was 7 years younger than John McCrae. I wondered if they attended the same school in Guelph? Research revealed that John McCrae attended Guelph Collegiate and Vocational Institute (a local High School). So did my Grandmother and her 9 siblings. Surely some of them passed John in the halls!

Now, I am not claiming that my Grandmother was John McCrae's best friend. In fact I'm not claiming she knew him well at all. But Guelph is a friendly city and neighbours living that near each other must have at least exchanged a few pleasantries now and again. I like to think of Grandma and John chatting for a few moments about the weather ("Hot enough for you, John?") or the price of fresh vegetables.

Grandma's younger brother Edgar Peer fought in WW1, as John McCrae did. Edgar was killed in 1918, John McCrae died that same year. I sent for Edgar's military records and discovered that Edgar was was shot in the thigh during the Battle of Passchendaele and sent to the Field Hospital where John McCrae was treating the wounded soldiers. I am not saying that John tended to Edgar's wounds, but I do like to play the game of "I wonder if..."

Playing the game of "I wonder if...." helps me place my ancestors in historical context and thus gain a fuller appreciation of their lives. It is also a heck of a lot of fun!

19th Annual Montana State Genealogical Society Conference

19th Annual Montana State Genealogical Society

Annual Conference

September 19-20, 2008

Butte, Montana

Almshouse Records & Immigration Dates

In the early 1800's port cities in the USA bore the burden of immigration. By the time they arrived, so many immigrants were tired, hungry and poor they ended up in the City Almshouse. This meant the citizens had to take care of them. At first the citizens of the city asked the Mayors for funds to support the poor. Eventually they asked the states, and by mid-century some states (PA, NY, MA) set up State agencies to deal with the issue. Eventually, beginning in the 1880's, the Federal Government nationalized the programs.

Dating back to the colonial era, New York City assumed responsibility for its citizens who were destitute, sick, homeless, or otherwise unable to care for themselves. The city maintained an almshouse, various hospitals, and a workhouse on Blackwell's Island (now called Roosevelt Island) for the poor.

While searching for other genealogy records, I stumbled on the Alms House Admission Foreigners & Nativity Records (New York City, NY) Bond Registers 1819-1840. The original records are held in the Municipal Archives, New York, New York. There are 2 pages for each name in this ledger. Due to time restraints, I only copied part of the left hand page. The information I extracted includes

Date of Admission; Foreigner (Surname); Foreigner (First Name); Age; Place of Birth; Vessel (Ship) Name; Where From

There is more information, including Ship Captain's Name, Ship Owner's Name, Date of Bond, Sureties, Date Discharged, Death Date, Remarks, Bonded, Commuted & Total.

For example, under date 1820 March 11 - Elizabeth Kennedy age 34 is listed as having died June 14, 1820; her daughter Mary Ann died Nov. 5, 1820

For individuals recorded in the 1855-1858 Almshouse Records the information includes ship name, date of sailing, ports of departure and arrival

This is a terrific database providing names of ships and immigration years for ancestors. It is freely available online starting in 1819 at http://www.olivetreegenealogy.com/ships/ny_alms1819.shtml

Genealogy Without Sources is Mythology!

How can you tell if the information posted by individuals on Internet genealogy sites is valid? Some sites have sources, others don't. How do you know what, and when, to believe what you read online??

A good rule of thumb is....

Don't trust anything you find on the 'net (or elsewhere) if it doesn't have sources.

Without sources you can't verify it, and you don't know whether the information came from a reliable source or whether it came from Great Aunt Martha who may have some of it right, but may have mixed up a lot too.

Maybe the info came from a book written by someone 100 years ago who didn't have access to sources we have now, or who just plain got it wrong.

Perhaps the information was transcribed for a webpage from a book source. That book source was transcribed from a microfilm record which was itself transcribed from the original. The chance of human error is greatly increased with each succeeding transcription.

Even if the information has a source, you should double-check it personally, either from the original source or from an independent source.

VERIFY, VERIFY, VERIFY!!!

You also want to think about the source itself. Is the source a good one? After all, if Great Aunt Martha gives me information on the birth or baptism of my 3rd great-grandpa and I put it on the 'net, and source it as "Remembrances of Great Aunt Martha", that's not necessarily a reliable or accurate source. After all, Great Aunt Martha did have that fall from a horse when she was a child and she IS 97 years old......

However if I source the birth or baptismal dates with full details on the church where I saw the original record, or the published transcript of those church records, that's much more reliable.

When in doubt, remember.... .

"Genealogy without sources is mythology"

© Lorine McGinnis Schulze
http://olivetreegenealogy.com/index.shtml

A Genealogical Fish Story

It's interesting how we genealogists are eager for stories of our ancestors - the more bizarre or unusual, the better! I'm sure everyone has an interesting tale or two (or more!) which has been handed down in the family.

But what happens when we find a paper record that might prove or disprove that family lore? How disappointing is it to find out that Great grandma Harriet was not the love child of the Duke of Wellington but according to her birth registration, was the child of a farmer and a scullery maid. On the other hand, how many bits of family lore do we find out are true, or have at least a grain of truth to them?

A bit of family lore passed down concerning my 3rd cousin twice removed had always intrigued me.

William Edward Learn (1885-1908) died tragically while fishing in the Niagara River. He had a rope tied around his waist while he was fishing and hooked a sturgeon which pulled him in and under. It was a month before his body was found with the rope and sturgeon still attached.

I wondered how accurate it was. A very kind correspondent sent this to me several years ago, copied directly from the Learn Family Bible. When the Ontario Death Records went online I decided to see what William's death registration gave for his cause of death. I expected to see "Drowning" as the cause of death. I expected I might not ever find out if the fish story was accurate.

Much to my surprise the cause of death was given as pneumonia which William had for 7days prior to dying. It seems a rather fanciful story for someone to dream up and record in a Family Bible. How did poor William's death from pneumonia end up being passed down in the family as William being killed by a fish?

I don't have the answer, I only have the story and a moral to the story. The moral is "Don't fall for family tales, hook, line and sinker or you could end up all wet"

One Step Search Engine for 1891 Canadian Census

Now that ancestry has added the 1891 Canadian census, the One-Step utility for the Canadian census has been extended to include that year. It can be found in the Canada/UK Census section of the One-Step website

Advantages of using the One-Step utility for 1891 Canada rather than going to the ancestry site directly include:

- can search all years from the same form

- can search on middle initial

- can search on birth year being between two values rather than using plus-or-minus

- can search on age

- can search on religion

- can select district from drop-down list instead of having to type it

- can specify more than 50 hits per page

1891 Canadian Census ONLINE!

Great News! Ancestry.com has put the 1891 Canadian census online. It's indexed and linked to the images of the actual pages.

If you have a subscription you should check it out, I've already found several ancestors. If you don't have a subscription you may want to subscribe now or take a free trial to find your ancestors.

I've noted some errors that may cause researchers problems, including mixing of families. For example I searched for my PEER ancestor. I found his name. I clicked on the name for more information and could see everyone in his family. However there were 3 different surnames and many many individuals linked into his family, complete with relationships such as "Son" "Daughter" etc. A check of the image revealed that in fact there were 3 distinct family groups living in separate households but the transcribers had combined them all together as one.

Other errors were children, some as young as 2 years old, listed as living alone. In fact a check of the image revealed that each of these children were in fact living in family homes.

I also noted several occurances of one family being split. So a search brought up the husband. Clicking on his name showed him with no wife and one child. His wife came up separately in the search engine and clicking on her name showed her living alone with several other children. A look at the linked image revealed husband, wife and all children living as one family. Why these these separate families have been merged into one or one family split into more than one is a mystery.

What it means is you must check the images to verify the transcribed information.

Have fun! And be creative in your searches...... my McGinnis ancestors were hiding under the MISindexed name of "Linnis"

New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Contributes Its 75,000-Volume Collection to The New York Public Library

New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Contributes Its 75,000-Volume Collection to The New York Public Library


Step to Create One of the World’s Largest, Most Accessible Genealogical Libraries: A Singular Resource for Researchers of New York Family History


NEW YORK, NY, July 21, 2008 –The New York Public Library (NYPL) and the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society (the G&B) announced jointly today that the New York Public Library will become the new home of the G&B Society’s library of 75,000 published works, 30,000 manuscripts, 22,000 microforms, 1,300 periodicals and digital computer media. Among the materials are 16th and 17th century land records; transcriptions of New York baptismal and marriage records; personal diaries and letters; and census data from as early as the 18th century. Joining the Library’s rich and heavily used genealogical and manuscript collections, the merged materials of the NYPL and the G&B will create an unparalleled, publicly accessible resource for those conducting genealogical research. The NYPL and the G&B will co-sponsor educational programs, create links to each other’s websites, and collaborate in various ways to make this invaluable resource available to the public.

Continue reading

The Van Slyke Family in America: A Genealogy of Cornelise Antonissen Van Slyke, 1604-1676....

The Van Slyke Family in America: A Genealogy of Cornelise Antonissen Van Slyke, 1604-1676 and his Mohawk Wife Ots-Toch, including the story of Jacques Hertel, 1603-1651, Father of Ots-Toch and Interpreter to Samuel de Champlain was published in 1996.

The focus of the book is Cornelise Antonissen Van Slyke born in Brueckelen, Netherlands in 1604 and his Mohawk-French wife Ots-Toch born ca 1620 at Canajoharie, New York. Cornelis came to the New World in 1634, settling at Beverwyck and then Schenectady, New York.

Cornelis Van Slyke's story is of a Dutchman who came to the New World as a carpenter at the age of 30.He became an interpreter for the Mohawk nation, was adopted into the tribe, and married a French-Mohawk woman (Ots-Toch) who never left her native village. Their children, all raised at Canajoharie, one of the Mohawk castles or villages, became well-known and respected in the Dutch community. All except one left the village and married Dutch settlers.

One of their children was my 8th great grandfather, Jacques Cornelissen Van Slyke who was known as Akes Gautsch, and whose Mohawk name was It-sy-cho-sa-quash-ka. Jacques was also an interpreter and one of the first settlers of Schenectady.

In my 189-page book, I trace Ots-Toch's lineage, and Cornelis' and Ots-Toch's descendants to the mid 1800s. The book is 8 1/2 x 11, paperback, coil bound. Laminated covers are available on request (see order form for cost). Pages 1-100 are narrative style chapters detailing the lives of Cornelis and his children, as well as Ots-Toch and her parents, and Cornelis' nephew Willem Pieterse. pages 100-189 are Genealogical Report style plus maps. The book is footnoted and indexed.