Thursday, March 8, 2007

Searching for Cornelia in the IGI

For my Cornelia Bresee project, I have been "data mining" in the IGI. There are quite a few records for a Cornelia Bresee born in the Albany NY area between 1760 and 1800. Unfortunately, none of the entries match the birth date I have for Cornelia (5 December 1780, obtained from a WorldConnect database record - source unknown). That means any or some of five things has occurred:

1) The birth date I have may be wrong - my Cornelia Bresee may have been born sometime between 1770 (youngest child born 1817) and 1780 (oldest child born about 1797).

2) My Cornelia may be one of the two Cornelia Bresee entries in the IGI born in Columbia County NY in 1775 (quite possible), or even one of the two born in the mid-1760's (less likely due to the children birth years.

3) The birth or christening of my Cornelia Bresee was not entered into the IGI database.

4) There may be a birth or baptism record for my Cornelia Bresee hiding in a church or town record that has not been extracted by the LDS or submitted by an LDS member. The challenge in this case is to find the record.

5) There may be no birth or baptism record of my Cornelia Bresee in any town or church resource. In that case, I'm out of luck and will have to find other records to find her parents (deeds, probates, etc.). I recognize that I may never find her parents.

I am operating on the assumptions that there is a record for her birth or baptism, that the birth date I have is reasonably accurate, and that she was born to a family living in Rensselaer or Columbia Counties NY (mainly because she was married in Schodack township in Rensselaer County, but right next to Columbia County - according to the WorldConnect database). However, I may be wrong, and therefore am trying to collect as much information as possible on candidate families for Cornelia.

In everything I've found so far on the Internet, there are many Cornelia's in the Bresee/variants family line in Albany/Greene/Columbia Counties up to 1800, but no Cornelia's in the Bries/variants family line in Albany/Rensselaer Counties up to 1800. That doesn't mean that she wasn't a Bries - but I've concentrated on the Bresee family so far.

Do you have comments or suggestions on the above discourse? Please share them with me either as a comment or as an email (rjseaver(at)cox.net).

2 comments:

Bill Blunt said...

Hello Randy

I can't comment on your search of US resources, as I don't know how complete the LDS extractions are for the areas you mention.

However, I'm conducting a similar exercise using UK records, hunting for a William Clark who was born (we suppose) around 1715 in North Yorkshire. William appears quite a lot in the IGI, as the grandfather of some 15 children born to his son, John Clark and Jane Barker. Fortunately, John and Jane's children show up in the parish records in North Yorkshire as 'Dade' records - detailed parish records named after the vicar who instituted them, who asked clerics to keep 3 generational records.

Unfortunately, I've never yet found any siblings to John, son of William, in the records. So... I'm approaching it sideways.

I've identified over 20 'Dade' records (kept between 1770 and 1800 in a lot of North Yorkshire parishes) within a ten mile radius of where John Clark was born. I'll be interrogating the Parish records on Monday.

If I find even one that has a grandfather as a William Clark, cartwright of Skipton on Swale, Yorkshire ... you'll hear the shout even in California!

I suppose my comment then, is ,,, have you found any siblings for Cornelia?

Best regards

THJnr

Randy Seaver said...

Hi THJnr,

I have looked for possible brothers of Cornelia in Jefferson county NY where she ended up as a wife and mother - some distance from where she grew up. Great suggestion, though!

Where is Skipton on Swale? Is it near Richmond or Darlington? I have a Richmond grandmother, so I made the visit to jolly old England in 1993 and visited my broken down castle on the hill above the river Swale. What a beautiful site! I still have two posters on the wall of my genealogy cave - one of the imposing castle wall from the river, the other the announcement of the summer medieval pageantry inside the castle. I wish I could have attended that - do they still have that sort of thing? Sounds like great fun!

Good luck with your William Clark search - that sounds hard because of the fairly common names. The parish registers are the way to go - but I know many are incom plete. I'm stuck in Wiltshire on all of my Richman and related lines due to poor parish records before 1800.

Cheers -- Randy