Category: New York State

Centennial Book of Liberty, NY

The Centennial Book of Liberty, NY is one of the less frequently seen documents of the history of that township.  We’re indebted to Denny Birmingham for lending us her copy of this now-scarce document for copying and re-publication.

Centennial book
The cover of the Centennial Book of Liberty, New York

What’s in it?

First, and most obviously, there are pictures – lots of them.  Most of the important building are shown, both commercial establishments and residences as well.  There are photos that illustrate the original settlement on Revonah in a way that makes it comprehensible to people living today.  (An interesting note here:  the name of the mountain had already changed from Hanover to Revonah when this book was published – often the date of the change is assumed to coincide with anti-German sentiment during World War I.)  The photos of the residences are fascinating as one tries to recognize the houses of today’s Liberty among them.  Most of the photos have been seen elsewhere, but the collection is a good one.

The text is very useful since it amplifies on the early history found in Quinlan’s History, and also fills in details of the years following Quinlan’s publication in 1872.  While the photos are a bit hard to relate to people today, there are also photographs of some of the leading citizens.

As mentioned, it is a modest book for a centennial volume, at least compared with some of this genre we have seen.  However, we think it will be useful to anyone with an interest in Liberty today and in its past.  We have compiled and included an index of the book including all names mentioned which should be helpful to those using the book for research only and not reading it through.

How to get the Centennial Book of Liberty, NY

Well, we happen to sell it as a download!

Want more information?  CLICK HERE to go to the Liberty, NY page on our main website, where you can read a bit more about it and download it.

 

A Wartime Yearbook

We’ve just re-published the 1942 Libertas yearbook from Liberty High School in Liberty, Sullivan County, New York.

You can be excused if your immediate response is “What?  You’ve published another Liberty High School yearbook?  What’s your plan?  To re-publish all of them?”

To tell the truth, we wouldn’t mind re-publishing all of Liberty High’s historic yearbooks, but realism tells us that we could never possibly find copies of all of them to scan — which gets us around to why the 1942 Libertas is different and interesting.

A Wartime Yearbook

First of all, it is a wartime yearbook!  Published only months after Pearl Harbor, it is still the only example from Liberty High School that we have of this genre.  There are many things that this yearbook has in common with non-wartime yearbooks (it has all the usual contents, for example, including photos with names of grades seven through twelve, and abundant advertisements) but the moment you pick the original up you notice that it has a soft cover rather than the typical hardbound book cover.

a wartime yearbook
Front cover of the 1942 Libertas, the yearbook of Liberty High School — note the front cover is paper this year!

Later in the war, yearbooks began to reflect a nation actively gearing to to support the war efforts.  Later yearbooks included lists of students who had left high school to serve and, eventually, in memoriam pages for those who would not be returning home.

Nonetheless, this is indeed a wartime yearbook.  We think it’s worth a look.  You can do so, and, if you wish, purchase a download of it, on our Liberty, NY page.  CLICK HERE to go directly there.

 

Methodist Church Records – Town of Liberty, NY Circuit

Back in the years preceding and following the dawn of the 20th century, the larger Sullivan County, NY, villages, such as Liberty and Monticello, had their own Methodist Episcopal (what the Methodists used to be called) churches with full-time clergy.  However, the smaller villages and hamlets might have had a church building, but the clergy was shared between several villages.  If you’ve heard the term “circuit rider” that’s what these clergy were.  They carried the records of each of the churches with them as they rode the circuit.

In the Town of Liberty, in Sullivan County, NY, there was a circuit that served White Sulphur Springs (then called Robertsonville), Swan Lake (then called Stevensville), and Harris (then known as Strongtown).   A succession of ministers served that circuit, and their compiled records are available to us, thanks to the diligence of Gertrude Barber back in 1929.

About church records

Church records, with variations depending upon denomination, tend to have records of liturgical events:  baptisms, confirmations (“joining the church”), marriages, and funerals, with occasional lists of all the members of a particular church at a particular point in time.  In an area that did not have state-mandated capture of birth, marriage, and death statistics until rather late (and then it was not infrequently neglected), church records can be the most important source of such data, surpassing even family Bibles due to their concentration of information about a locality.

Methodist Church Records: Town of Liberty, NY Circuit

We had previously included this compilation on one of our Memories of Liberty CD-ROMs, but now that we have discontinued our CD line, this one gets to stand on its own.  For anyone with ancestors in the more rural parts of the Town of Liberty, or someone interested in the history of these areas, this collection is very important.  We’ve also compiled our own index of the records.

Please CLICK HERE to see more information and to download this collection.

 

Recovering history
Between the Lakes Group helps you recover history!

The Fulton-Fraser Cemetery in Ferndale, NY

Gertrude Barber’s compilation of the Fulton-Fraser Cemetery in Ferndale, a hamlet in the Town of Liberty, New York was an achievement of hers in the 1929-1930 timeframe.

Her typescripts, done at a time when few perceived much value in collecting such information, have become a genealogical mainstay for those researching in Sullivan County, New York, and this cemetery, another in the Town of Liberty, is another example of her work.

Fulton-Fraser Cemetery
The first page of Mrs. Barber’s compilation of the Fulton-Fraser Cemetery in Ferndale, Town of Liberty, New York

We do not know the current status of this cemetery, or even where in Ferndale it is (or was?) located. We can hope that today it is known by another name and is being cared for.  However, her description of the run-down state of the cemetery nearly a century ago suggests that this may not be the case, and, assuming that it continued to decline, it is worth considering that a compilation like this might not even be possible today.  This compilation includes our own index. 

CLICK HERE to access the main Liberty, NY page on our website for additional information and to download.

  

Gravestone Inscriptions of the Old Liberty Cemetery

Liberty, Sullivan County, New York

These inscriptions were collected by Gertrude Barber (1929-1930) as part of her effort to capture the rapidly disappearing local history of many Sullivan County communities.

Gertrude Barber, the person who collected and transcribed the gravestone inscriptions of the Old Liberty cemetery, one of a number she collected in the 1929-1930 period, deserves our thanks for this effort.  She spent her summers in the Sullivan County area collecting church and cemetery records, and during the winters transcribed her work using a manual typewriter and six carbons, which she deposited in major libraries that showed an interest in her work.  Not all did.  Not many people at the time were interested in this kind of material, or in this geographical area, and were it not for her efforts, much of the information on these stones would eventually be lost.  No doubt some already is.

We regret that she did not get around to collecting all of the cemeteries in Sullivan County, but we are grateful for those she did do.  There are no doubt errors in her copying and transcription.  Again, because of the magnitude – and difficulty — of the copying and transcription task she undertook we readily forgive her errors and are thankful again that she undertook the task at all.

We are delighted to make this compilation of the old section of the Liberty, Sullivan County, New York cemetery, together with the index we compiled of it, available as a download.

Please CLICK HERE to go to the Liberty page of our main website for more information and to download Gravestone Inscriptions of the Old Liberty Cemetery.

Recovering history
Between the Lakes Group helps you recover history!

Liberty High School Annual for 1919

The Liberty High School Annual for 1919 was the first-ever yearbook Liberty High School published.

1919 graduates
Some of the 1919 graduates from Liberty High School

About yearbooks

High school yearbooks are one form of history within which everyone is recorded when they graduate from high school. They, and their community, are frozen at a point in time that the yearbook captures and keeps. Haircuts, clothes, friends, teachers, the sense of humor of the era, the area businesses – they are all captured as they were, not as we choose to remember them or tell our children they were back in the good old days.

1919 versus today

The class of 1919 graduated before a period of major social change, as a cursory examination of the yearbook will demonstrate.  First off, the size of the class demonstrated the extent to which completion of a high school education was not a general expectation.  In a community that had not changed that much in size between 1919 and the later, post WWII yearbooks we republish, this graduating class is tiny.  Viewing the credentials of the faculty, it’s clear that the expectation that a high school teacher would have even a baccalaureate degree is a creature of the near-century that elapsed since this class graduated.

The function of the yearbook has also changed, quite clearly.  More recent yearbooks are almost entirely about the class graduating, and on the activities in which they were participants.  This issue turns the focus back to those who went to Liberty High School in previous years, even decades.  From our point of view today, capturing this much news about Liberty High School alumni dating back into the previous century (the first class with alumni reporting was the class of 1893) is a book for those searching for a larger population than a single year’s graduating class.

It’s available!

You’ll not be surprised that we’re offering the Liberty High School Annual for 1919 as a download.  Interested?  CLICK HERE to see it on our main website.

Three Court Calendars – Sullivan County, NY

Three Court Calendars of the Sullivan County Court.

July 1893 term, June 1899 term, and January 1904 term.

To us these are quite novel.  Although they were obviously very familiar to practicing attorneys a century and more ago, we have not encountered other specimens of similar material.

Sullivan County Court Calendar
Title page of a court calendar for Sullivan County, NY

Information includes the attorneys in the county were at that time (they’re listed),  the county officers  (likewise listed), and, interestingly, the grand jurors and the trial jurors for the term are listed too.  It specifies which cases would be heard, and approximately upon what date.

Among the litigants, we say some familiar names, including a railroad that was never completed – the Liberty and Jeffersonville Electric Railway – suggesting that without even operating it succeeded in running afoul of some people (the investors, perhaps?).  Regardless of its historical value, it’s fascinating to look at these relics of a judicial system that is now transformed into a far different animal.

More about this, as well as the opportunity to purchase a download of it, can be found on the Sullivan County page of our main website.

Early Sullivan County Timeline

 

Quinlan’s History of Sullivan County is considered the definitive history of Sullivan County, New York up until 1873.

James H. Quinlan, historian
James H. Quinlan, historian

While we were working through those early years in Quinlan’s History, we discovered that it was sometimes hard to tie all those events together in a sequential way.  To help us understand Sullivan County history better, we decided to use Quinlan to help develop a timeline of those years.  Suddenly much was made clear.

We’re glad to be able to offer this timeline free for your use.  Just click below to download it with our compliments.

Sullivan County Timeline to 1873

If you find that this timeline raises your curiosity and makes you want to read the whole book, there’s no reason not to do so.  There are several free scanned versions of Quinlan you can download, but our favorite is one scanned by Penn State University.  A link to a free version we like is on our main website on our Quinlan page, HERE.

After you download it, you might discover what we did:  that a 700 page book really needs an index.  No one can fault Quinlan for not providing one, given all that he did provide us with.  But we did decide to do something to make up for his omission.  We indexed Quinlan ourselves.  While you are on our Quinlan page, you will probably notice that we sell our index.  Frankly, it was a lot of work, and we think you will find that it is worth the price.

 

High School Yearbooks…..#1

Virtually all local history material is of value to genealogists and historians.  Only in the past year or two, however, have the large genealogy companies (ancestry.com, for example) hit on the quantity and quality of genealogical and historical material contained in high school and college yearbooks and annuals.  And, they have begun to offer copies of some of these on their websites.

We’re happy to say that we were more than a decade ahead of the giants in recognizing the importance of yearbooks and in beginning their re-publication here at Between the Lakes Group.

Because of all the recent attention directed to yearbooks, we decided to list all of the yearbooks available from us, in the order of the year the yearbook was originally published, all on a single page.  There you’ll also find links to the location on our site you can find more information about them.  You can see that list on our Yearbooks page — just CLICK HERE to review it.

We’ll have a few posts on the subject of yearbooks — particularly high school yearbooks — and how you can use them.  For what?  Well, for starters, to fill out the lives of people you may be researching, to learn more about the communities you’re interested in, and even to establish an elusive connection to a family member.  Those posts will come as we write them in the next few days and weeks, so check back here for them.

The occasion that really prompted this page was our republication of the Port Jervis, NY High School yearbook for 1938, “Senior Memoirs”.  A pretty hefty yearbook (as they go) at 138 pages, with a few rarities in it (such as senior horoscopes to supplement the more standard Last Will and Testament section, and, hearkening back to yearbooks of two or three decades earlier, prize stories and poems), it is one of several Port Jervis High School yearbooks that we have republished.  It can be found on our Orange County, NY page.

(You’ll also see there the very first appearance of our snappy new “buy now” button!)

Child’s Gazetteers

Our experience has been that using available gazetteers to get a comprehensive overview of a county or a community is a great way to get started finding out about a new area.

Nearly always they have lists of inhabitants (usually heads of households) at a point in time about a year before the publication date of the gazetteer in question.  That’s almost enough to justify using these sources all by itself!

However, they — particularly those originally published by Hamilton Child in the 1870s and 1880s in New York State and Vermont — have a wealth of additional valuable information.  (We republish other gazetteers too, but let’s concentrate on this set for a moment.)

For example, often there is a county map.  There are capsule histories of each township in the county, which usually include population statistics.  Generally there’s short description of the educational system, some details about each community in the county, and a list of the houses of worship in the township with some statistics here as well.

We always find the advertisements — and the economics of gazetteer publishing dictated that there would be lots and lots of them — fascinating vignettes of rural life in that time period.

Gazetteers are also (justifiably) criticized as containing a fair number of pages of what can best be described as boilerplate, which appear in virtually all editions of that publisher’s gazetteers.  Examples include short descriptions of the states and territories, stamp duties, postal rates and regulations, popular nostrums of the time, and the like.  But this material (which actually is worth reading once, anyway) is not what you buy a gazetteer for:  you buy one to learn about a county and what was in it.

web3_large
A sample page from a gazetteer in New York State — heads of households and businesses

We’re happy to publish no less than three of Child’s gazetteers of various counties in New York State.  If one of these counties circa 1873 is of interest to you, by all means have a look!

—Sullivan County Gazetteer

—Lewis County Gazetteer

—Wayne County Gazetteer

Maybe, just maybe, one of these will be as useful to you as we have found it!

 

 

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