Monday, July 7, 2008

Hudson and Mohawk Valley Genealogies

I'm trying to fill in narrative data for some of my ancestral families that are in my database, but are unsourced in my database. For most of these families, I obtained family trees or narrative data from other researchers many years ago, and I also have "paper" from derivative books for many of these in notebooks on my bookcases in my genealogy cave.

I have quite a few Dutch and English families who immigrated into the Hudson and Mohawk valleys in the 1600's and early 1700's. There are several well-known books that summarize these families, and some of them are transcribed and available on several web sites.

The most useful ones to me today were found on the excellent USGenWeb site for Schenectady County, New York Genealogy and History, at http://www.schenectadyhistory.org. Here there are links to:

1) The People link has the following databases available:

** Genealogies of Schenectady County families
** Jonathan Pearson's Genealogies of the First Settlers of Schenectady
** Schenectady families in Hudson-Mohawk Genealogical and Family Memoirs
** Surnames of Schenectady County Families (from the family files of the Historical Society)
** Congressional Representatives serving Schenectady County
** New York State Senators serving Schenectady County
** New York State Assembly Members serving Schenectady County
** Officials of the City of Schenectady
** Our Hall of Fame (1938)
** List of Pensioners on the Roll 1883

The Jonathan Pearson books on the First Settlers of Schenectady families and the Hudson-Mohawk Genealogical Family Memoirs were the most useful to me today. The latter work has an overall surname index, and is separated by counties of the Hudson and Mohawk region. Volume IV is not completely online yet - the list of surnames not covered is here.

2) Places

3) Research Topics

4) Books -- There is an excellent bibliography of Schenectady area books.

5) Research Sites -- records available, researchers and repositories.

This web site is a marvelous help to researchers like me who are trying to understand the history, geography, commerce and other features of this area, and how my ancestral families lived in this area.

If you have Schenectady area ancestry, and haven't visited this web page recently, you should!

1 comment:

Thomas MacEntee said...

This site rocks - you and I both go way back in Schenectady (I am from the Putman, Mabie, Van Rennselaer, Bradt lines and probably more than I can count) so we know about this site.

One complaint: I wish the sub-sites on the Pearson books had page numbers. I had to go to Ancestry and Internet Archive to actually get copies with page numbers that I could use for references.