Finding Bresee data in traditional resources

I had many earlier posts about my search for the parents of Cornelia Bresee (1780-1840) - see here and here.

The microfilm that I ordered on 29 March finally came into the FHC last week, so I went down today to review it and capture whatever information that might be helpful. The book is "The Bresee family of Livingston Manor, Columbia County, New York" by Revo Morrey, 3 volumes, written in 1945, filmed by GSU in 1972 on microfilm reel FHL US/CAN 0,897,238.

There are three separate volumes to this work, which is apparently on the shelf at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City.

The first volume is the handwritten notes taken by Revo Morrey of abstracts of baptisms, marriages and deaths from church record books and other resources, probably all from the FHL. The author doesn't cover ALL of the known churches, but she found many of them. The first volume also has the first half of family group sheets made from the records that she abstracted.

The second volume has the rest of the family group sheets, which were all alphabetically arranged. On these group sheets, the author does not try to connect poeple to parents without a record, so there are many "unconnected" families."

The third volume contains a summary of the towns in this area, and then a genealogy report of the descendants of Christoffel Bresee, based on the records found in Volume 1.

I found the entry for a Cornelis Bresie (parents Petrus and Maria Bresie) baptized on 3 December 1780 in St. Thomas Lutheran Church in Churchtown NY. Hmmm. The IGI says that this is Cornelia Bresie, daughter of Petrus and Maria Bresie, baptized on 5 December 1780 in St. Thomas Luterhan Church in Churchtown. Hence, there are possibly two errors in the Morrey work in the one baptism entry that I am really interested in! Uh oh! Just darn! Son of a gun... [note to self, calm down, don't cuss...]

Many of these church records in Columbia, Rensselaer and Dutchess Counties in New York have been transcribed and published by Arthur C.M. Kelly in the 1960 to 1990 time frame. What a massive and well-done task! All of them are available on microfilm from the FHL. Some of them are on the shelf at the San Diego FHC - I found 7 of the 24 works by Mr. Kelly on the book shelves at the FHC. I'm hoping that more of them are on the shelves at other local repositories.

It looks like I need to order the microfilm with the baptism records for St. Thomas Lutheran Church of Churchtown in order to see if the entry is Cornelis or Cornelia and if the date is December 3 or 5. Unfortunately, the records in the Kelly books are transcriptions of the original records. I wonder if the original records are available anywhere? At the church? At a local historical society? Kelly must have add access to them in the last 40 years.

I limited my search in the IGI and other online resources to just Bresee/Brazee/Brissee/Brusie/etc. spellings of the surname. It is apparent, from the Morrey book, that some records spelled the name with a capital P also. That may explain why many families seem incomplete in the IGI records I did find. It is evident to me that Revo Morrey and Arthur Kelly reviewed the same church books - but they may have interpreted the handwritten Dutch text differently.

So it's back to the drawing board. I need to print out the 60 images that I captured on my flash drive today (all I could get on my 500 mb drive, at 8.2 mb each, there is a lot more to capture!). Then I need to check the Morrey genealogy report with my own database from the IGI, and then go look for more Presee/variant data in the IGI. Finally, I need to check all of the Morrey abstracts from the church records to ensure they are consistent with the IGI records.

I guess this is having fun...I wish that all of the transcribed data was consistent!