Category New York History
A 19th Century Waldo
Browsing through those 1870s county histories for New York and I discovered this guy, a kind of 19th century Waldo, was a frequent stand-in for the artist. Some amazing sketch work in these volumes by the way.
An Almanac from Dutch New York
The year was 1759 and the English had just defeated the French on the plains of Abraham in the major battle of the French and Indian War. By the end of the year, an enterprising printer in New York City, James Parker, continued a tradition of publishing an almanac in Dutch for the New York […]
Dutch Bibles and Beaver Hats in 18th century NY Wills
From the takeover of New Netherland in 1664, through to the 1820s, New York collected inventories of the material possessions of the deceased. The records, now available for free on Ancestry.com, (search for “Estate Inventories and Accounts, 16661-822”) are far from complete, but might be useful to historians and genealogists. I’ve been using them, for […]
Environmental History of Dutch America
The North American Drought Index (http://drought.memphis.edu/NADA/Default.aspx) uses dendro-chronological data (tree-rings) to measure wet v. dry years over time and by region. The tool looks very impressive and I’ve only begun to figure out how it works. Essentially, you can select a custom area of the map of North America and a date range and then […]
The Longest Possible Dutch Name: Dutch Jokes in 19th Century Vermont
While looking for Dutch New York sources on newspapers.com, I’ve noticed a whole lot of Dutch jokes appearing in newspapers in Vermont in the 1820s through 1850s. There are a few reasons why I suppose this is the case. Vermont borders the Hudson Valley and so many Vermonters had crossed into New York State to […]
A Schepel of Wheat as Currency in Dutch New York
You might remember from history class that colonial Americans bought and sold things with Native Americans using wampum, that is beads made from shells. The Dutch in New Netherland used wampum too, but they called it “sewant.” This was an important but not the only form of money in the colony. In 17th century Virginia, […]
An African American Migration Mystery (part 3)
Continuing now with my third post on the topic of African Americans in Washington County, N.Y. In the previous posts, I challenged the 1810 census reading of 2,815 “other persons not including Indians not taxed” for Washington County. More specifically, I challenged the idea that these were all free blacks and I suggested that perhaps […]
Where did 2,500 missing African Americans go? Or were they never there in the first place?
In a previous post, I questioned whether there was a large African American migration to Washington County NY in the first decade of the 19th century, or if this was actually some kind of census anomaly. Could over 2,500 free African Americans move into and out of a rural county in one decade and be […]
A Census Anomaly or a Large African American Migration in upstate New York?
North of Albany, along New York’s border with Vermont, Washington County formed in 1772, and grew quickly in its first decades. If the census is to be trusted, there appears to have been a large migration of free African Americans into and then out of the county between 1800 and 1820. Census records note that […]
Michael J Douma 