New York Slavery Records Index Records of Enslaved Persons and Slave Holders in New York from 1525 though the Civil War

The John Jay College for Criminal Justice in New York has created a database relating to the history of slavery in the state of New York from the Dutch colonial era to the years before the Civil War. The database was abstracted from over 35,000 records collected in New York relating to slavery. The abstracts contain names, places and dates valuable to anyone with ancestral ties to New York.

https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/search/




RS

Mining Ancestry.com Record Collections

Ancestry.com is famous for the shaking leaf icon, symbolizing a "hint" of a possible record for someone in your Member Tree. Sometimes it is valuable information, but often the lead is as dead as that ancestor. The most frustrating thing is the seeming random nature of the hints. Someone you aren't actively researching, possibly in a database of dubious value. Not very efficient, but it keeps you clicking through those Ance$try pages.

Randy Seaver and Russ Worthington have developed an extremely useful "hack" of the Ancestry search function that can zero in on those hints with laser-like focus. Randy Seaver is the author of the Genea-Musings site, and was the originator of this workflow. When Ancestry changed its search syntax in 2016, it was Worthington who updated the code. Worthington is probably better known in the genealogical community as Uncle Russ.

Seaver noticed that each online family tree is assigned a unique tree number by Ancestry. He also found that each record collection has its own unique database number. A little trial and error, and he was able to create an Ancestry.com search string that will compare a specific Ancestry Member Tree to a single Ancestry database. The results will be all the matches, or hints, for that database.

For example, I have several lines of research in Indiana. I could do a separate search for each ancestor in Indiana, Death Certificates, 1899-2011. That would be time consuming and always leave me wondering if I missed someone. By using the search string template developed by Seaver and Worthington, I get a tailored list of people in my Member Tree who may be in that dataset. Not every hit is correct, but the accuracy is much higher than doing individual searches.

The blog post outlining this technique can be found here. The post also contains a handy list of frequently used database IDs you can plug into the template.

Happy Hunting!

MC