We’re willing to bet every family historian and genealogist has stories of areas where there isn’t the level of documents you’d find in other areas. Sometimes it’s a County where there was a devastating fire at the courthouse that destroyed every Vital Record and Probate/Property record before a certain date. Or it’s societal like if you’re searching for African American Vital Records in the South before 1905 or so, there was a concerted effort post-Reconstruction to focus on white records only. Other times it can be the “Manifest Destiny” states had European settlers long before any Federal/State government was established, and then when the States were formed formal Vital Record collection often lagged.
For our family there is no area in the United States that’s a more pernicious, more complete, black hole than the Upper Hudson River valley of New York from 1780-1840. When you’re looking for records in Greene, Ulster, Dutchess, Columbia, Albany, Rensselaer, Schoharie and Delaware County, every one found can feel like a miracle.
as Grandpa Ken Mandy the Charter Captain would always say, “That’s why they call it fishing not catching”. We guess this is fun because it’s not easy!
Contributing factors
There’s not a lot of empirical research on what causes this gap. It’s known to other researchers, but there’s no consensus on why. In our experience, there seems to be several unique factors that created this void of information:
Late collection of Vital Records on the County/State level
While the area was partially settled by Europeans going back to the 1600’s, when the Dutch left and Americans started their migration around the Revolutionary War. Migration picked up with the Mohawk Wars pushing Native residents off their land in the late 1700’s, but you see counties like Greene not collecting birth and death information until it becomes a statewide requirement in 1880. That’s true for most of these counties, and they didn’t capture all “required” records until 20-30 years after that. By then they had over 100 years of settlement with no centralized record collection. By comparison, our home county of Racine in Wisconsin was first settled in 1835 and Marriage records were collected by 1837, Deaths by 1853, and Births by 1876.
The area was often a migration waypoint
A pattern we see repeatedly is a family born in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Downstate New York migrate to the region around 1780-1800, establish a farm and then several of their children (or Grandchildren) migrate further West to Ohio, Michigan, or Wisconsin and establish their family histories in the new location. Almost invariably their records like oral histories, family bibles, etc. omit details of their Eastern families and the few church records, etc. will maybe list a birth/baptism record in an area in New York, but nothing further because marriages and deaths occur in other states.
Churches were numerous, and consolidation of records seems rare
New York in the late 18th and early 19th Century was a hotbed for the Second Great Awakening in American religion (Link), and while it doesn’t seem that “new” churches/denominations were as prevalent in this area as Western New York, it does appear that every village had it’s own congregation of each of the more established faiths (Dutch Reformed, Congregationalist, Methodist, etc.) but as these communities grew and contracted, the local church seems more likely to end than to merge with a neighboring congregation. This leaves a lot of records that were lost to history, or which were locally held and not collected in larger Church records. The Family Search library is full of these small congregational records, often collected by amateur family historians and published locally…which limits their availability.
The interest in genealogy by the public at-large started a Generation after the children/Grandchildren of the original European settlers in this area had moved on
Many of the self-published Family Histories that become more common in the mid-1870’s (tying in with the US Centennial) and remained a Genealogy staple into the 1940’s. These were compiled long after many of the children/grandchildren of the late 1700’s settlers had moved out of the area. The popularization of Genealogy as a hobby really kicked off with the ubiquitous “vanity” publications that became a staple starting around 1876. You start to see books like “History of Greene County, New York : with biographical sketches of prominent men” (published in 1884) which were collections of publicly available Vital/Historical records, knitted together as a narrative (often by local historians hired by the publisher), and included biographies of any “notable” family that paid the requisite fee to have their family history published (that they themselves drafted and submitted to the publisher). Because the biographies were self-submitted, they are often a wonderful almost first-hand listing of parents, marriages, and children but only for the families of means that stayed in that area. Similar books were published in the locations these New York children/grandchildren migrated to, but they rarely list more than the county of their birth (at best) and we’ve never found one that listed details on their parents of siblings back home.
Another way this manifested is that during this rise in interest of family histories, there’s numerous examples of individuals who dedicated years to collecting various local records into what now might be the only surviving data on birth/marriage/deaths. Lists like the Barbour Collection and James Arnold’s 21 volume “Vital records of Rhode Island 1636-1850″ largely don’t exist for this region. Part of that is because there are no central collections to reference, part of that is because by 1880 most County local historians don’t have the experience or people to provide pre-1840 information about the area. Additionally Vital Records were just starting to be gathered by governments.
An example
Many of our most stubborn brick walls are related to families that migrated to Wisconsin from this area of New York, and we have little to no information on them before the migration. Our Tradewell, Yeoman, Place, and Blackmar lines all dead-end in the Mohawk Valley and have resisted our best efforts.
Our most recent example is the Blackmar line, which we discovered after we were able to prove our Yeoman line back one generation after 2 years of research (story coming soon!)
Once we broke through the Yeoman brick wall and first identified William and Lucinda (Blackmar) Yeoman from Greene County, New York as our 6th GGP we celebrated for about 3 minutes before we wondered “who are their parents?”.
Given the pain we had on the Yeoman line, we knew breaking down William’s parents was going to be a major challenge, but we decided that “Blackmar” was unique enough of a last name to take a quick look and see if we could identify her lineage. But, we’re searching in the Hudson River Valley Black Hole so of course we found literally nothing.
The only Blackmar from New York in right timeframe was Cain Blackmar who is in the 1790 US Census living in Dutchess County. We found Cain in the 1800 US Census, as well as the Federal tax records for 1801 and 1802 and that’s it. There is no records of his family, his wife, or his children in New York. It’s a hot lead that Lucinda likely is Cain’s daughter, but it can be nothing but a guess.
Searching Ancestry for Cain Blackmar immediately brought up one of the self-published family histories that, as we mentioned above, were pretty common in New England. We eventually found two, both published in the early 1930’s, whose authors both traveled the region and found 1000’s of local records from Massachusetts and Rhode Island then published detailed (but unsourced) family trees. Just like that we were able to back from Cain to his ancestors going back to arrivals in 1630. We can go back 6 generations from Cain in Rhode Island, but we have essentially nothing on Cain or his children in New York.
We had a complete line back to Hannah Yeoman (1796-1865) as soon we started charting our family tree. But getting from Hannah to her mom took 10 years, including 2 years of intensive research given the limited resources from the Hudson River Valley. After another 6 months of research we have only a guess on her father. There are zero records relating to that father’s wife (FamilySearch’s global, single Family Tree has his spouse listed as “Mrs. Cain Blackmar”), but since he’s from Rhode Island we can effortlessly trace him back to his English ancestors in the 1590’s.
This leaves us with a new brick wall merely because this family was in the Hudson River Valley in the early 1800’s. Just one generation in upstate New York and this branch became impenetrable. But, as Grandpa Mandy the Charter Captain would always say, “That’s why they call it fishing not catching”. We guess this is fun because it’s not easy!
