February 11, 2010
A new page of obituaries
A new page on the Bardeens, Orrs and relatives was posted today, #4 in the set.
I have been spending a lot of time on the first of our History Tour Series, which is about the Universal Friend and her colony, which was the first permanent white settlement in western NY (in 1788). In many ways this was the first venture of an organized group from the old colonies along the seaboard into former Indian lands west of the Fort Stanwix treaty line established by the British in 1768, just after the French & Indian War. I am writing a book about the Friend’s life, focusing on the political, social and religious influences that shaped her movement, and the historic consequences of her journey and settlement to the west.
I am working (slowly) at getting the Hillside cemetery in Dundee, town of Starkey, on line. So far the index (not quite finished) includes more than 9000 names, which is why it is going so slow.
I’m also working on a presentation I’m giving in October, second in a series called Doing History. The first was four sessions, two given on each of two successive Wednesdays, and I plan to follow the same format. The title of that group was From the Ground Up, and was about the value of land records for family and local historians. I have the presentation on a CD, and when I have time (joke!) I want to add it to my website. The new group is called Milo’s Bones and is about the structure and uses of town history, again for family and local historians.
I am managing a large project as the county’s Records Manager, to index all the county’s maps in one place, and link it to images of the actual maps. We have now finished data-collection for all the recorded maps (say 12,000 of them), most of which are now in the final database index and linked to images through document-management software. All that took more than 3 years and is to some extent still ongoing. I have turned my main attention now to the unrecorded maps (about another 13,000). These are in most ways harder to index, because recorded maps have already been indexed to some extent, and we can use that as the outline for our data-gathering. No such luck with the unrecorded maps, which include just about anything one could imagine by way of maps and plans, from original town surveys to aerial photographs, highway surveys, bridge plans, railroad rights-of-way, even cemetery maps. In most ways they are more fun, but they do take a lot more time to finish off. Historians are paid to take the long view, thank goodness.
January 29, 2010
Some additions
I uploaded the Barrington cemetery pages to the GenWeb site today. This completes the cemeteries in all nine towns and in two of the villages. Still remaining are the two Catholic cemeteries in Penn Yan, Lakeview cemetery in Penn Yan, and Hillside cemetery in Dundee. I estimate when everything is up there will be a minimum of 70,000 names in the general index, which is far more than the living population of the county has ever been (about 23,000).
I solicit updates, additions and corrections to any of the cemetery pages. Just send the information in an email to <history@yatescounty.org>. I have an excellent set of corrections to City Hill cemetery in Torrey, and a promise of periodic updates to the village cemetery in Rushville. I thought I’d get everything up the first time before working on the updates, but of course I could change my mind.
I have also added a page to the continuing Bardeen/Orr saga, containing the censuses that I used in the research on the Bardeen family. More next week.
I put a link on the GenWeb page of the website to this blog, in hopes of luring more viewers here. Otherwise, it’s kind of like giving a party to which nobody comes.
January 27, 2010
New page today
Actually, it’s a continuation of yesterday’s page, on the Bardeens and Orrs. Today’s installment brings in a set of Rhode Islanders (there were very many of these early on), the Rhodes, Andrews and Corey families. This project kept getting bigger and bigger.
January 26, 2010
A new wrinkle
Today I posted a page with a piece of research I did on several local families nearly 20 years ago. It was one of my first big research projects and I remember having an awful lot of fun doing it. The page is named Bardeen/Orr and may be chosen from the list at the right.
January 22, 2010
Friday!
On the one hand, I love weekends just as much as everyone else does; on the other, I dislike leaving things half-done for three days. That’s the nature of the work, though; it’s incremental to the nth degree, and there are hardly ever any good stopping-places.
I spent much of the day formatting web pages for the different cemeteries in Barrington. There are not many more than 1000 names in the index, and I’m perhaps halfway through integrating the Barrington index with the humungous general index, which now has about 36,000 names total. The separate pages for each cemetery are basically done, except for scanning the little maps that show where each one is, inserting them and then checking all the links. Once this is done and the general pages that guide the visitor through each town into each cemetery are finished, and the index integrated, and the PDFs made so people don’t have to download the entire general index to find a name, then I can upload. Next week, if the creek don’t rise.
Fran Dumas
Yates County Historian
January 21, 2010
What I do
Even many people who live inside New York don’t know about the public historian system. It dates back to 1919, and requires each municipality (county, city, town, village) to have a person on board whose job it is to preserve the municipality’s history. I am one of 57 county historians, and have been since April 1996. In Yates County the title includes the duties of the Records Management Officer, an official also required of all municipalities by state law, this one passed in 1988. In 1989, when the county’s legislature had to appoint an RMO, I was already working for the historian, whose job was then part-time. They picked me, paid me a little extra to manage all the county’s records, and that was that. I had to make the job up as I went along, and with a lot of help from the people at the State Archives, I think I’ve done a reasonable job — at least as far as paper records are concerned; electronic records are another whole ball game, and so far I have not been able to convey my own sense of urgency to the Powers That Be.
Though it is pretty rare for Historians to do records management, the jobs do mesh quite nicely. As Historian, I get many, many requests for information, most of them from genealogists; and the records are awfully handy. We have a nice research area, with indexes and other aids, many of which can also be used by online researchers who visit the Historian’s website (see previous post).
At present, I am working to get the cemetery readings from the town of Barrington on the site, which will leave only the two big cemeteries in Dundee and Penn Yan. We are scanning and indexing such records as have come our way, including right now George Goundry’s ledger book from 1799-1804 at Hopeton Mill, and the records of the Barrington Baptist Church. Only indexes will go on the site, on account of space constraints; I’d love to put the scanned images up, but we will make copies for people who want them, second best but really not bad.
I hope this week to put up on this blog a page about some research done on a local family. We have at least 12 cubic feet of family files, that contain correspondence back 25 years or so. I’ve done a lot of it myself, as that was my first job for the Historian back in December, 1987: doing genealogical reearch for clients. Those were the days! Now I want to share some of it with you, so stay in touch.
Fran Dumas
Yates County Historian
January 20, 2010
A newborn blog
This is my first-ever posting to my first-ever blog, so the whole thing will be a learning experience. I hope to post more or less daily on what is going on here in the Yates County Historian’s Office; and also to post bits of research, perhaps items sent by readers such as transcripts of wills, etc. Those are my first goals, and, as they say, they may be altered at any time (only to add new items, I hope).
I hope this will be a two-way conversation. Please feel free to comment, send group sheets or pedigrees that you’re willing to share, record transcripts, whatever.
For information about Yates County, and many indexes and record transcripts, go to the Historian’s web site, which is part of the County’s web site <www.yatescounty.org>.The site can also be reached by Googling Yates County GenWeb; the first result will be a page with a list of various items on the site, and a search box that will look things up all across the site.
Fran Dumas
Yates County Historian
