Saturday, July 7, 2007

My Research Day in Carlsbad

We had a CVGS research trip today to the Carlsbad Library - 10 of our members attended. We carpool there because it's about 40 miles north of Chula Vista. Carlsbad Library has a whole floor for genealogy - I estimated about 1,500 linear feet of books and periodicals on the shelves. This library has an excellent book collection, and adds many new genealogy books each year.

I had minimal time to prepare for this trip - I made a list of 21 books to look for. Amazingly, they had 7 of them, and I was able to browse through several of them.

My main goal today was to try to find information on the Columbia and Rensselaer County areas of New York - to find the church book transcriptions and county histories so I could find more on the Bresee family and try to understand the history of the area. They had about 15 of the Arthur C.M. Kelly transcribed church books on the shelf, including the Churchtown St. Thomas Lutheran Church baptisms - the one which lists Cornel(ia) Brussie as born 5 December 1780, the daughter of Peter and Maria Brussie.

I did not comprehend the magnitude of the job done by Arthur Kelly some years ago in transcribing these records and publishing them. What a monumental effort - and absolutely vital to understanding the family groups in this area before 1850.

There was a nice, fairly new book on the shelf about Rensselaer County and an 1878 edition of the Columbia County history book, with a separate index (a life saver!).

When I found the record for Cornelia Bresee several months ago, I started looking at the collateral families, since that is what we as genealogists do! My hope was that a collateral family might have information on Cornelia's family and her marriage. The collateral surnames in the Bresee line are Van Deusen, Dyckman, Scism and Claes. The only surname book on the shelf was Dyckman, but what a marvelous work - "Johannes Dyckman of Fort Orange and his Descendants," two volumes, by Marjorie Dikeman Chamberlain.

My other "find" was the book "History and Genealogy of Elder John Whipple of Ipswich, Massachusetts, His English Ancestors and American Descendants" by Blaine Whipple, published in 2003. This work is really well done, with long sketches of the Mathew Whipple family in Bocking, Essex, the immigrant John "Elder" Whipple to Ipswich, his son John Whipple, and William Whipple, who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Following these sections, is the traditional genealogy section in an NGS format. The whole work is well researched and written, with excellent end notes in each chapter.

I spent some time reading three of the current genealogy magazines that I don't subscribe to (I even took one down to the restroom!) and got caught up with them. I also browsed through the periodical shelves to find the latest copies of journals that I don't subscribe to, such as The Genealogist, Rhode Island Roots, etc.

All in all, it was an intense 5 hours broken up only by a snack break and a quick lunch out in the patio at the library. I rode with our new members Dave and Judy, along with member Bob, and it turns out that Bob and Judy have ancestry in Giles County, Tennessee! It is a small world!

No comments: