Long Island Source Records

This is a collection of articles published originally in The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record containing primary source materials on Long Island.The records included range from censuses and lists of early inhabitants to newspaper notices, wills, deeds, town records, and Bible and family records. Among the census records in this volume are the Southold census of 1686, the Hempstead census of 1698, and the 1800 federal census of Kings, Queens, and Suffolk counties. Early Kings County wills and deeds are abstracted, as are wills found in Queens County deed books. In addition, there are town records or vital statistics for Newtown, Huntington, Gravesend, Hempstead, and, especially, Southold. The entire collection of articles is completely indexed (25,000 entries!) and forms the perfect companion volume to the two-volume Genealogies of Long Island Families (see Item 3433).

Since its inception in 1870, "The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record" has been at the forefront in publishing articles on Long Island families, many of them lengthy, definitive studies spread out over several issues. In a number of these articles the English or Dutch origin of families is established. No better purpose could be served than to gather these articles together and reprint them in their entirety, thus making available a mass of information on Long Island families that has previously been difficult to locate. With the articles appropriately consolidated and arranged, and additions and corrections from "The Record" properly appended, this two-volume compilation becomes the single greatest repository of Long Island genealogies in existence. In addition, it is fully indexed and is published with an introduction by Henry B. Hoff, former editor of "The Record."

Covers the period of colonial history from the beginning of European colonization in the Western Hemisphere up to the time of the American Revolution.

A groundbreaking medical and social history of a devastating hereditary neurological disorder once demonized as “the witchcraft disease” When Phebe Hedges, a woman in East Hampton, New York, walked into the sea in 1806, she made visible the historical experience of a family affected by the dreaded disorder of movement, mind, and mood her neighbors called St.Vitus's dance. Doctors later spoke of Huntington’s chorea, and today it is known as Huntington's disease. This book is the first history of Huntington’s in America. Starting with the life of Phebe Hedges, Alice Wexler uses Huntington’s as a lens to explore the changing meanings of heredity, disability, stigma, and medical knowledge among ordinary people as well as scientists and physicians. She addresses these themes through three overlapping stories: the lives of a nineteenth-century family once said to “belong to the disease”; the emergence of Huntington’s chorea as a clinical entity; and the early-twentieth-century transformation of this disorder into a cautionary eugenics tale. In our own era of expanding genetic technologies, this history offers insights into the social contexts of medical and scientific knowledge, as well as the legacy of eugenics in shaping both the knowledge and the lived experience of this disease.

Tells the untold story of the life and career of Nathan Sanford, a New York State lawyer-politician who capitalized on opportunities created by the new politics of the early Republic to achieve social mobility. Set in the tumultuous decades of post-revolutionary America, Reluctant Reformer brings to light the long neglected New York lawyer-politician, Nathan Sanford. As a lawyer, Sanford contributed to modern property law. In the United States Senate, he dealt with central banking, struggled against slavery, and supported popular voting for presidential electors. He was a major designer of the program to rationalize the nation’s currency. Against a backdrop of European wars and the War of 1812, he capitalized on opportunities for upward social mobility in a period of nation-building and commercial expansion. At the New York State Constitutional Convention of 1821, he fought for universal manhood suffrage. Educated in history and government at Clinton Academy on Long Island and at Yale, and a student at the Litchfield School of Law, Sanford rose quickly to prominence as the federal attorney appointed by President Jefferson to serve all of New York State. Fueled by ambition, he navigated a career among Republican factional leaders—DeWitt Clinton, Aaron Burr, and Martin Van Buren—first in New York City, and then in the state and the nation. In 1824, he ran for vice president on the ticket with Henry Clay. Attuned to his familial ties to eastern Long Island but beyond the bounds of the rural community of his youth, Sanford faced decisions about whom to trust with a militia’s gun and a citizen’s vote. He could shift from his principles toward political compromise, as in restricting black male suffrage and in the removal of Indians from their ancestral lands. In this book, Sanford is revealed as a wealth-seeking lawyer and officeholder who contributed to the expansion of democratic rights and responsive government in the Early Republic. In doing so, he proved to be a reluctant reformer who deserves a place in our public memory. Ann Sandford holds a PhD from New York University and is the author of Grandfather Lived Here: The Transformation of Bridgehampton, New York, 1870–1970. Her articles have covered topics in early modern European history and the history of Long Island. She has been a history professor and a business executive. She lives in Sagaponack, New York.

The major part of this work is an alphabetically arranged and cross-indexed list of some 20,000 Maryland families with references to the sources and locations of the records in which they appear. In addition, there is a research record guide arranged by county and type of record, and it identifies all genealogical manuscripts, books, and articles known to exist up to 1940, when this book was first published. Included are church and county courthouse records, deeds, marriages, rent rolls, wills, land records, tombstone inscriptions, censuses, directories, and other data sources.