Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Searching for Bresee in PERSI

I decided to look for periodical articles for the Bresee/Brazee/Brazie/Bries/Breese surnames in PERSI (the PERiodical Source Index) which is available online at HeritageQuestOnline.

Using the "People" link, I input each of the surnames into the search box. You can use a wild card in a surname in this search at the end of a name. There were some hits, but there were none that were the typical family genealogies you would find in NEHGS or NYGBR or other periodicals.

I went back to the PERSI search page, and clicked on the "Places" link, hoping to find church or other records for the New York counties of interest.

I input State = "New York," County = "Rensselaer" and Type of Record = "Church" and got 114 hits of different church records. For Columbia County, I got 217 hits for church records. Some of these are for the early church records (before 1800), but some citations do not include years of the records. These have the best potential I've found to date to identify the parents of Cornelia Bresee. Hopefully, there are indexes available for these periodicals.

I made a list of the periodicals and issues that look the most promising to me, based on the locations of Bresee/Bries/variants families in the late 1700's (basically Schodack and Greenbush in Rensselaer County, and Kinderhook, Claverack, Ancram, Livingston and Linlithgo in Columbia County).

I noticed that I saw no church records for Linlithgo or Livingston in Columbia County (and I know they lived there), so I went back to the "Places" search box and deleted the Type of Record = "Church" and substituted Keyword = "Livingston" or "Linlithgo." Apparently, no church records have been published for those places, but other types of records have been published.

I will go to the FHC sometime soon and check for the periodicals - I know they have the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record on the shelf. If I can't find the other periodicals at a local library, I will send an email to a local library in the target county and see if someone can do some lookups for me. Failing that, an order to Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne IN to copy the articles may be necessary.

This experience in PERSI is similar to my previous research - I rarely find surname articles of value, but there are lots of locality articles - and many of them are not indexed anywhere.

Have you had a different PERSI experience? What have I missed here - any suggestions?

No comments: