Up the North River

On Saturday, we took a quick trip along the North River, aka The Hudson River from earliest settlement to 1800. This was the theme of both the first presentation and the all day conference at Central New York Genealogical Society. Jane Wilcox, an expert on the Hudson River area of New York State, gave four separate presentations.

Many people think of the earliest settlers to this area as the Dutch who settled New Netherlands with Fort Orange. They would be wrong. Actually, the Walloons, a group from Belgium came here before the Dutch, who had claimed the territory, arrived. They were the very first settlers after the Native Americans and blazed the way for the other settlers.

We learned, also that there were a few more groups of various ethnicity and religions that settled this area during the time period. Jane asked for guesses in the beginning of the lecture. The answers ranged from single digits up to about 20. Having heard the lecture before, I jokingly put out an answer of 100. I knew mine was too high, but knew there was many more than most in the audience imagined. The actual answer was somewhere around 45, depending on if she had actually found all or not.

A Tale of Woe is an interesting case study that Jane presented next. Starting from the mention of an unmarried relative in a printed genealogy, she brought to life one of her collateral ancestors. Probate and court records, among other sources were able to reconstruct the life of this woman who fought the conventions of the day. She disagreed with her brothers on matters and brought a child into the world just before she died, still unmarried. The case study describes what happened to this child as well. In an interesting twist, we found that the president of Central New York Genealogical Society, Chris Wilcox, is also a relative of this woman on a different line of descent.

The afternoon started with a lecture on the tenant farms of the Hudson Valley. We learned about the patents and manors. These consisted of vast holdings by the wealthy of thousands of acres in this area. For decades these lands were rented. Thus, the people that settled here were unable to own the land themselves. Even without deeds to the land, there are various ways to trace these settlers as Jane showed us in this lecture. Many of the leases are for three lives. What surprised many is that this is not three generations, but for the lives of three people mentioned within the lease. It could be a husband, wife and child or three brothers or any combination of people that had an interest in the land. Once the last of them died, the lease would revert back to the landowner.

Finally, we had a whirlwind tour across Upstate New York. We learned about various libraries, archives, historians, historical societies, genealogy groups and online sources for information on our ancestors. Using a small sample from each category, Jane demonstrated what a rich variety of resources are available and how to make use of each of them.