Trying to connect my family tree to Harris-880.

Question

Hi,

I am a newcomer to WikiTree and this is my first post. I am trying to link my family tree to Harris-880.I need assistance with primary resources for the following pairings:

Benedict-3346 to his father Benedict-2086

Benedict-3346 to his wife Northrup-1095

Northrup-1095 to her mother Searles-798

Searles-798 to her father Searle-1160

Searle-1160 to his mother Moore-24991

Moore-24991 to her mother Wellman-272

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Julius

Comments

Julius needs help finding NY records (not found on FamilySearch or Ancestry). Does anyone have a susbscription to the NYG&B Society?

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I have an NYGBS membership, but that does not mean I can dip into an online database and find the New York records that Julius is looking for. New York is not like Massachusetts where vital records are concerned. There is no one place to look up vital records for the state, and in fact for most of the state there was no formal recordkeeping until circa 1880-1914. For times before that, information comes from the records of individual churches, family bibles, tax records, censuses, newspapers, etc. -- whatever you can find, if anything exists. Some excellent material is free online; there is some good content on familysearch, Ancestry, and AmericanAncestors; NYGBS has some great online resources and (apparently) a lot more exists in the form of paper documents in their archives; and some material is found only in [mostly expensive] published books. I have found that the late decades of the 1700s and the early decades of the 1800s in New York are particularly challenging to research.

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Thanks Ellen.  I have a huge brick wall in NY in the early 1800s as well. I was wondering if getting a membership to NYGBS would be worthwhile to help find records in late 1700s-early 1800s (for Julius as well as myself). I've searched everything available online, including Ancestry and NEHGS. I guess a trip to western NY may be in my future.  Appreciate the info!

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Please don't write off NYGBS, Traci.  It is an excellent source for access to research materials, as well as advice on New York state research.

My earlier comment was meant to say that it does not provide the kind of instant gratification that many of us have come to expect in the Ancestry.com era.  We cannot expect to go to the NYGBS website, run a quick name search and come away with a set of sourced BMD facts for a person who lived in New York.

The site does have full text access to 150+ years of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record journal, which has research articles about a variety of New York families and communities throughout history, as well as transcripts of some primary records, including many that are not published elsewhere. I have found a lot of good material in articles the NYGBR (not always about the people I was looking for ) that is not available elsewhere, but much of this is content that requires careful reading (not a quick lookup). They have recently completely revamped their web presence with a slick new search utility, and they seem to be actively adding other online documents to the website. The search utility now includes full-text search results (not just indexed names), which has helped me find some nuggets that did not appear in the indexed search results. 

I recommend NYGBS membership to anyone who is serious about researching New York genealogy. Annual membership is $77 (or $139 for two years) and it includes full access to North American material on FindMyPast.

Answer 1

Have you tried familysearch.org ? It’s a free site.

Comments

Thank you Marion. I have been working through family search, but so far the info is the same as currently listed in the WikiTree profiles. Will keep trying.

Answer 2

My wife is from Sherburne, Chenango Co. NY, she has similar difficulty finding primary resources. Land and Probate records seem to be the best. Town Clerks in Upstate NY were not keeping vital records at the time you are researching and Churches were slow to get established so few church records exist.

Comments

Thanks William. Did find some census and school attendance information that was useful.

Answer 3

The relationship of Moore-24991 to her mother Wellman-27 is documented rather clearly in the Norwich vital records on AmericanAncestors at:

Norwich CT: Vital Records of Norwich, 1659-1848. (Online database. AmericanAncestors.org. New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2015.) Originally published as: Vital Records of Norwich, 1659-1848. Hartford, Society of colonial wars in the state of Connecticut, 1913. https://www.americanancestors.org/DB1637/rd/28745/17/577940206

The details found in the records are described at https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Wellman-272 .

Is Julius seeking to obtain a copy of the page from the published transcription of the vital records that lists the marriages and children of Mary Wellman?

Comments

I added that source and info today. His connections are all fairly certain as I've verified as much as I can for now.