New York County Church and Cemetery Records

See Also Research In State Church & Cemetery Records - Church records rank among the most promising of genealogical records available. Indeed, for periods before the advent of civil registration of vital statistics (a very late development in many American states) , church records rank as the best available sources for information on specific vital events: birth, marriage, and death. They are also among the most under-used major records in American genealogy. Part of the reason lies in the number of denominations-there are hundreds of them. Identifying and locating the records of these various churches makes even professional genealogists hesitate......

Particularly useful as vital records substitutes among the surviving New York church records are those of the Dutch Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, and Quaker groups.

The largest collection of New York church records is probably that of the Daughters of the American Revolution in the State of New York Cemetery, Church, and Town Records. Scattered volumes may be found in local libraries for the area in which a particular church is located. To determine what records have been covered, consult the Master Index and Supplement. A card catalog at the state library indexes this collection by county and thereunder by town, village, or other municipality.

Another large collection was commissioned by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society and is known by the name of its editor, Royden Woodward Vosburgh. Its 101 volumes cover mostly Dutch, German-Lutheran, and Presbyterian records, but not all are indexed. Besides the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, these volumes are available at the New York State Library and on film at the New York Public Library, the FHL, and in other libraries.

For western New York there is a collection of church records compiled by the Study Center for Early Religious Life in Western New York at Ithaca College; the study center is now defunct, but the collection is available at the Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853-5310. A published list of the records is available.

Many church records, mostly early and particularly for Long Island, New York City, and the Hudson River Valley, have been published in The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record with a large collection of unpublished records maintained by the New York

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Cemeteries - The largest number of New York cemetery records (the bulk of which are actually transcriptions of cemetery marker inscriptions) is found in the multivolume collection of the Daughters of the American Revolution in the State of New York, Church, and Town Records, located at the New York State Library, the New York Public Library, and the DAR Library in Washington, D.C. Scattered volumes are found in other libraries including many local libraries in the area in which a particular cemetery is located. To determine which cemeteries have been covered, consult the master card catalog index to the collection, arranged by place, at the New York State Library. While these DAR collections are useful, it is unfortunate that most of the cemetery inscriptions have been alphabetized, thus destroying important clues based on the location of the grave markers.

Some counties have had many or nearly all of their cemetery records published. These include Putnam, Dutchess, and Ulster counties along the Hudson River, and Genesee County in the west. The Orange County Genealogical Society is publishing that county's cemetery records, a volume for each town. Published cemetery records are also found in Tree Talks, The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, and other genealogical journals. Local libraries and historical societies throughout the state are likely to have collections of cemetery records for their areas. A list of New York City area cemeteries, with addresses and telephone numbers, is available from the Municipal Archives.

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Cemetery records and gravestone inscriptions are a rich source of information for family historians. Cemetery and other sources of information associated with death include: