Quinlan’s History of Sullivan County package

Several years ago, we re-published a real classic,

Sullivan County, New York

Since then, free downloads of that volume have become available.  We we could see that there wasn’t much point of keeping the CD-ROM in our catalog, and that it might be a disservice to our customers to ask them to pay for something that they could have had for free elsewhere.  Hence, we discontinued the CD-ROM.  (If you would like to find a free version — and Quinlan is absolutely THE go-to source on early Sullivan County — here’s a good place to download it for free.)(You’ll find the image quality of the free version isn’t as good as ours, but free is free!)

There is one big problem with Quinlan’s History regardless of what version you use.  It has no index.  Of course, creating indexes was as difficult and time-consuming back when Quinlan wrote his history as it is today (maybe more so — we at least can use a computer in our indexing process), so we cannot fault him for omitting it  However, its absence is a lasting defect.  We decided that we could add value, so we put everything else aside and indexed it ourselves.  If you’d like, you can buy a copy of our index for $2.50 — CLICK HERE to go to our website.

HOWEVER, we didn’t stop there.

We decided that we could even improve on that.

When we used Quinlan, we discovered that it was difficult to correlate what was going on in one township with what was happening in other townships and the larger world outside.  To help deal with this, we prepared a detailed timeline from Quinlan.  We’ve included it, and we hope you find it as useful as we have.

And, sometimes, it’s nice to have some pictures to look at when you’re reading about an area.  While there are very few if any Sullivan County photos available of a time before Quinlan wrote his book (circa 1872) and rather few for the next few years.  So we did throw in a few postcards from the turn of the century, just for fun.  We hope you enjoy them!

So, here’s the package deal:

get (1) the full text of Quinlan (our high resolution scans), with appendix, advertisements, etc., AND (2) our complete index, AND (3) the timeline, AND (4) the pictures, all for $5.00 — and you can download it in PDF format right now!

If you’re interested in Sullivan County, New York, and our Quinlan’s History of Sullivan County package sounds like a reasonably attractive proposition, visit our website and download it!

 

 

Child’s Gazetteer of Sullivan County, NY

Child’s Gazetteer of Sullivan County, NY is one of only a few printed sources of Sullivan County, NY historical data contemporaneous with the time it was published.  It’s generally considered essential if you’re doing anything serious with the history or genealogy of the New York county that went on, 75 years later, to become “The Borscht Circuit”.

The book includes both historical material about each township in the county, as well as the expected tables of households replete with the name of the head of household, the business they are in, and, for farmers (which most people did at least as a sideline back then) the number of acres they held.  The advertisements sprinkled throughout the volume are a study in themselves.   Realizing that someone’s name can appear many places in the volume, we compiled our own index of the book, something we felt was lacking and something we needed for our own purposes.

For more than a decade we have offered our scanned version of that important book on a CD-ROM, including the index we compiled of that book, for $20.  As we have been phasing out our CD-ROM line, replacing it with downloads, Child’s Gazetteer came up for republication, and we’re happy to say that it’s now available as a download at a huge saving over the CD-ROM price.  The download is only $4.50.

You may be wondering why we chose to republish this as a download when there are free versions of the book available online already.   Here are the reasons:

  1. Our version is high resolution page images, and you can read it easily.  The free versions, sadly, are low resolution and portions are actually illegible.
  2. Our version includes our index.  The free versions lack an index.
  3. A key part of the original book was a large fold-out map.  Ours is reproduced so that it’s actually usable.  Legibility is a real problem with the free versions.

(By the way, we’ve done a recent post on why we elect to republish things that are already available for free — Click HERE to read it, if you’re interested.)

If our republication of Child’s Gazetteer of Sullivan County, NY for 1872-73 is of interest to you, why not have a look at our main website.  HERE’s the link directly to the page with more descriptive material and the download.

 

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!

Sullivan County, New York

Sullivan County, located about 100 miles northwest of New York City in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, is where the founder of Between the Lakes Group was born and grew up.  His parents, and two of his grandparents (and their grandparents) had lived there for most or all of their lives.

Today they would have been called packrats — and that’s good, because it meant that when Between the Lakes started up in 1999 we already had a wealth of historical material about Sullivan County in our archives (a polite name for cardboard boxes in the attic).

The consequence is particularly good for you if you are curious about Sullivan County or any of its towns and villages or any of its histories (because there have been quite a few of them).

Topics we cover that you might find interesting include all of the townships:

–Bethel (yup, the site of the famous Woodstock Festival)

–Callicoon

–Cochecton

–Delaware (on the Delaware River)

–Fallsburgh (or Fallsburg) (including Mountaindale, Woodridge, and others) (one of the three hubs of the “Golden Triangle” of the Borscht Circuit

–Forestburgh

–Fremont

–Highland

–Liberty (our hometown) (another of the three hubs of the “Golden Triangle”, the site of Loomis Sanitarium and of Grossingers)

–Lumberland

–Mamakating (the first town in the county)

–Neversink (one of the earliest towns, today the site of two New York City reservoirs; also one of the last remaining “dry” townships in the state)

–Rockland (and Roscoe and Livingston Manor — legendary trout country)

–Thompson (which most people know better as Monticello, but which also includes Kiamesha Lake) (the third hub of the “Golden Triangle”)

–Tusten

Sullivan County boys
Two Sullivan County natives, Rube Hardenburgh and Jim Bonnell

Did we mention that we have lots and lots of Sullivan County material?

Why not CLICK HERE and check out what we’ve got (but be prepared to spend some time!)