Kiss me I’m Irish

Feeling inspired by St. Patrick ’s Day? Interested in Irish heritage? Come the Schenectady Historical Society and learn more about Irish immigration into the city and county.

We have family files on many traditional Irish last names including O’Connell, McAlister, O’Hara and Flannigan to list only a few! And if your interest tends more toward general information about immigration we also have twelve books involving Irish history and genealogy as well as files on the Irish in Schenectady.

So come and try your luck…maybe you will find of pot of genealogical gold!

A Few Simple Tips for Doing Family Research

We research all kinds of questions at the Schenectady County Historical Society, however genealogy queries probably make up more than 50% of our research. Not only do we receive requests for information over the phone and through email, but we also have many researchers come to the library to use our resources themselves.

As a result of so much genealogical research, we have developed some strategies for effective and efficient family research.

Tip 1: Decide what questions you want answered about your ancestors. It is often easy to say that you would like to know everything about everyone, but it is easier to start off small, and build. Often people begin by wanting full names, dates of birth, marriage and death and sometimes the place of birth, marriage and death.

Tip 2: Start your family tree with yourself. Often people are looking for a link to colonial America, and they try to trace a family tree, from say George Washington, down to themselves. Often these people are not actually relatives. Instead, it is easier to start with yourself, work backwards, and fill in as much information as you know. Once you have something to build on, you can work backward more easily.

Tip 3: From personal experience, at least in Schenectady, religious affiliation often has no bearing on where two people get married, or have their children baptized. This is especially true for the early citizens of Schenectady. So just because someone was Catholic, don’t give up if you can’t find them listed!

Tip 4: Ask your relatives for help. Even if your living relatives are from the same generation as yourself, you never know what stories they might have heard or what they remember. It is often a good idea to keep track of confirmed facts and information passed on in stories. If you know someone was born on a certain date, but you only think the place was Schenectady, indicate this on your family tree by using different colored inks or a special symbol.

Tip 5: Share what you know. If you compile a family tree or collect information, don’t forget to share it with your family and your local historical society. Even if the information you collect does not go far back in time, it may still help researchers in the future to track down their relatives.

Hopefully these tips will help you in your search for information about your ancestors. Please contact us at the Society for more tips, or with more specific questions. And please remember to share your findings.

City Directories, Take a Closer Look

One of the amazing resources that we have here at the library is our collection of city directories, ranging from 1841-1968. In my opinion the directories are often under appreciated. Yes, they provide addresses for the residents and businesses of Schenectady, but if you take a closer look, they can tell us so much more about Schenectady than that.

The way I see it, the directories serve as a time capsule for a year of Schenectady history. They provide us with advertisements of local businesses, “The newest styles first, the best styles always, the Wallace Co.” in 1911 or “When you need protection go to Marcus Wing, Room 5 Ellis Building” in 1909 or “Subscribe for the Schenectady Gazette, Terms: $1.00 a Year” in 1885.

Each entry provides the full name of a resident and his/her occupation and place of employment. This means that the directories provide us with a great source of raw data, which can be used in a number of ways. We can look at last names in particular neighborhoods to determine ethnic majorities and how they change over time. We can also look at the kinds of occupations listed and how they change. We could also determine how many people employed in the city actually lived in the city itself. You can also use the directory to see how the city government was organized through the years, what departments it was divided into.

In a chat with Frank Taormina about the usefulness of the directories he pointed out that you can use the directories to establish connections between people. By seeing where people lived in relation to one another, and in a sense recreating the neighborhoods in which people lived, you can see how close people were. Often it is where people lived which lead to marriages and business partnerships.

So next time you are in the library doing some research, make sure you look in the city directories and they might give you some interesting pieces of information that you wouldn’t otherwise know.

When it is Spring in the Stockade, One Word Comes to Mind: Flooding

Spring may be just around the corner for us here in Schenectady, and in the Stockade that means one thing for sure, flooding. Every year, as the snow and ice melt on the Mohawk, the river levels rise and parts of the Stockade district are flooded. However, unlike the earthquakes that have just hit Japan and the tsunami in Hawaii, the flooding of the Mohawk is a predictable result to the end of winter.



The flood of 1914, location unknown

Here in the library the flooding of the Mohawk is well documented with newspaper clippings and photographs, including information that goes back as far as the 19^th century. In 1832 a man named Louis John Barhydt was caught unprepared by the rising river and was forced to climb a tree, from which he was later rescued. The newspapers reported the worst flood in Schenectady’s history with two killed, hundreds evacuated and bridges destroyed by the end of March, 1914. In March of 1936 the water level of the Mohawk rose 17 feet above normal. Even my mother has stories of her grandmother refusing to evacuate her house on North Street because she lived on the second floor. She wasn’t afraid of a little water, and she had plenty of food, so she was staying put! That would have been in the 1960s and 1970s.



The ice on the Binnekill,
from the Grems-Doolittle library



If you are interested in learning more about the history of flooding in the Stockade, or if you would like to share your stories and pictures with us, come down to the Grems-Doolittle library and have a look through our files and photos. But be warned, if you come in March, you might want to bring some waders!

Sorting through the collection, one box at a time

In past blogs I have been talking about interesting items that have been coming out of our collection. As much as I would like to say every day at the library is full of discovery and excitement, often days go by without too much excitement. That is not to say that our projects and work is not important. Today I found myself finishing up a project. I had been organizing a group of documents had been donated, having a connection to some Schenectady residents who were here in the 1860s. Organized is actually a dangerous word to be used in an archival situation because best practice argues that if a collection was compiled by one person, the papers should remain the order in which they were left. The idea is that the organization tells just as much about how the original owner was using and thinking about the papers as what is actually written on the papers themselves. However, in my case with this collection was not really compiled by one person, and I was not rearranging them.

What I was doing, and what is usually done with any archival collection donated to the society, was putting the documents into acid free folders, unfolding any sheets which were folded. At the same time, I was compiling a list of what the documents were about, their dates and who was mentioned. This information, along with quantities and folder numbers was then used to create a box list. Once the documents have been re-housed in acid free folders and those folders placed in an archival box it was time to create a finding aid, the stage I found myself at today.

Finding aids are an essential part of the archival system at Grems-Doolittle, for it is the finding aids that tell us what the collection is about. Finding aids are not a listing of what documents are in a collection, but rather a summary of the kinds of documents, the types of documents, the dates of these documents and their quantity. All of this information and more is contained in what is known as the scope note. Additionally, background information about the collection, including biographical information about the compiler or collector or subjects is also included in the finding aid. Once the finding aid is completed, it and a box list are filed upstairs and the collection can be returned to the basement. And now if someone wants to look at a particular part of that collection we are more prepared to help them access what they want and understand the greater context in which it sits.

A day in the life of a library volunteer: Carol Lewis

I mentioned in an earlier blog that the Grems-Doolittle library is bolstered by the efforts of our many dedicated volunteers. Carol is one such volunteer. Very knowledgeable about both the history of Schenectady and the library collections, she is one of the best people to talk to when you are doing research in the library or just had an obscure question you need answered. Having always enjoyed history and having been brought up in a historical area, she always wanted to spend time at the Historical Society, but only found the time after retiring in 2000. By 2003 she was serving on the Historical Society Board as a trustee and is currently in her third term.

When I asked Carol what volunteer projects she enjoys working on the most, she explained that there are aspects of each project which she finds fun and interesting. One of Carol’s particular interests is the Erie Canal, a topic which is widely covered in the library’s collections. Besides researching the Canal, Carol is also involved in many ongoing projects with the library, including organizing the ever growing photograph collection. This often entails identifying buildings and people, and sometimes even photographers. Carol is also largely involved in the cataloguing of new books and other library materials as they come to us. She sits at her typewriter creating cards for our card catalogue, and inputting catalogue information into our digital database. Carol was one of the few volunteers involved in an inventory of the library conducted in 2009, a task I am sure she hopes never to have to repeat.

Rediscovering our own collections, a box at a time

Ideas of archival best practice have changed quite a bit in the last fifteen years or so and occasionally as we are trying to keep our records up to date we find things that have been forgotten for a while. Just a few weeks ago, while looking for something in our basement, several shoeboxes of documents were found, which are from the early 18^th century. Many of these documents are linked to Reyer Schermerhorn and quite a few of them are in Dutch. While it is unfortunate that we were unaware of these documents existence, the good news is that they are being looked at in more detail now, re-boxed and listed.  Then they will be available for interested researchers.

There are some challenges to such a find though, for example where did these documents come from and what is their story. Luckily for this discovery we were able to trace the documents back to their donation and Katherine was able to contact the donor and gain more information about how they came to us.

Of course there are other challenges to the collection. Old documents that have been folded for a few hundred years don’t always appreciate being unfolded. The fact that so many of the documents are not in a language that any of us can actually read is yet another challenge. But don’t think we will let that stop us, it may take us a while, but we will get a better understanding of these documents in time.