Transcribing Records of Enslaved New Yorkers

New York City Mayor Eric Adams recently announced an ambitious project at the Department of Records and Information Services to make accessible historical records documenting thousands of formerly enslaved New Yorkers. The records in the Municipal Archives date from 1660 through 1827 when New York State abolished the practice of slavery.

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Slave and School Records in Kings County, 1799-1819. Old Town Records, Gravesend, NYC Municipal Archives.

The records are part of the Old Town Records collection. This series includes records created by the towns and villages in Kings, Queens, Richmond, and Westchester Counties prior to consolidation in 1898. Recently processed and partially digitized during a project funded by the National Historical Publications & Records Commission, the records provide unique documentation of communities now part of the Greater City of New York. Over the course of the processing project, For the Record published several articles tracking progress and highlighting aspects of this collection. Processing the Old Town Records Collection, Oyster Boards in the Old Town Records and The Genealogical Possibilities of Manumissions in the Old Town Records are a few of the articles.

This week, For the Record interviewed Arafua Reed for information about the transcription project and how interested persons can volunteer to participate. Arafua is a City Service Corps volunteer with AmeriCorps and NYC Service, currently serving as DORIS’ DEIA Coordinator.

For The Record: Arafua, what are the records that are being transcribed?

Arafua Reed: It’s going to be a phased project. The focus of phase one is birth certificates and manumission documents, along with some court minutes from the Old Town Records collection. During the second phase we will transcribe information recorded in other collections such as the Records of New Amsterdam and the Common Council.  

FTR:  Can you tell us about the provenance of these records?

AR:  Most of these documents resulted from the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery enacted by New York State in 1799. The law stated that children born to enslaved women after July 4, 1799, would be legally declared “free.” Since these children were still considered property with material value, this came with a loophole that their freedom would become valid only after a certain amount of time had elapsed—25 years of age for women, and 28 years for men—meanwhile these children were still required to work. Therefore, enslavers were required to record the children’s births on legal documents.

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Certificate of Birth for Harry, a male child born on October 25, 1804, reported by John Vanderbilt on September 5 1805. Records of the Town of Flatbush, Old Town Records collection, NYC Municipal Archives..

Enslaved people born prior to July 4, 1799, were re-categorized as indentured servants; this language (using “servant” instead of “slave”) appears throughout the manumission documents. Typically, the document includes the enslavers statement reporting the birth, and a corresponding certification of its accuracy by the town clerk. In rare instances, there is text in a will document freeing an enslaved person.

FTR:  Do you know about how many individuals will be identified by the transcription project?

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Birth records, ledger, 1826, Town of Flatlands, Old Town Records collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

AR: There are about 1,300 birth and manumission records in the books slated for transcription during this phase.

FTR:  Please describe the transcription process.

AR: The Municipal Archives is using an online service called From The Page for the transcription project. Once logged-in, volunteers will click on a book and select a page. Or, they can click “Start Transcribing” (just above the list of volumes) and will be taken to a random page that hasn’t been worked on yet. The format of volunteer submissions are split into two sections: there’s a text area field, where the entire page will be transcribed in full. Just below this text box is a spreadsheet, where volunteers will insert the information about children born to enslaved mothers.

We’re asking that volunteers type what they see and to keep in mind the transcription tips that sit in the middle of every page. It’s an easy process to get into; reading some of the handwriting is probably the most difficult part of it.

FTR:  Are transcribers provided any assistance with reading the hand-written records?

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Birth records, 1810-1811, transcribed in ledger, Town of Flatlands, Old Town Records collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

AR: That’s my current responsibility. There’s a convenient Notes and Questions box under each transcription page, so if volunteers need help with some of the words, or if they want a review of something very specific on one of their pages, or even if they find something interesting, they can send that message there. These notes are public, so if volunteers want to engage with someone else’s comments, they can.

FTR:  How will you make sure that the transcribers do not make mistakes?

AR: That is another part of my responsibility. I don’t expect anyone to complete these pages to perfection and, when I see mistakes, I can easily correct them. I’m currently reviewing the submissions page by page, but there are ways for volunteers to note specific pages that they need help with. After a submission is all typed out, volunteers can check a box by the Preview and Save buttons that says, “Needs Review.” This lets me know that a transcriber would like someone to look over the work before it’s considered complete. These notes are very helpful for me to track progress. In some cases, I might need to adjust the transcription conventions to include things that people struggle with often.

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Certificate of Birth for Henry Lynes, a male child, born on November 5, 1804, reported by Simeon Buck, November 26, 1804. Records of the Town of Flatbush, Old Town Records collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

FTR:  How will the transcribed information be made available?

The Archives will publish the birth records as a database in Collection Guides. In addition, the Archives has curated a sub-collection for birth records of enslaved people and a webpage on archives.nyc devoted to holdings featuring Records of Slavery and Emancipation.

FTR:  It looks like a significant impediment to using manumission records to trace ancestry is the lack of surnames. In the example below, we know that “Tom” was born on March 28, 1806, to “Bet,” but we do not know their surnames. Do you have any advice about how to overcome this impediment?

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Certificate of Birth for Tom a male child born on March 28, 1806 to Bet, reported by George Lott on September 27, 1806. Records of the Town of Flatlands, Old Town Records collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

AR: We suggest that researchers try using vital record collections of the communities where enslaved persons resided. Given that we know the date of birth and a first name, and if the formerly enslaved person remained in the community, it might be possible to find additional demographic information in vital records. The Municipal Archives collection of vital records includes records of birth, death and marriage in many of the Old Town communities.

FTR:  What should a person do if interested in participating in the project?

AR:  To start working, a volunteer can visit the Records of Slavery page that lives on the website.

The Genealogical Possibilities of Manumissions in the Old Town Records

The Department of Records and Information Services is currently digitizing New York colonial and early statehood administrative and legal records dating from 1645 through the early 1800s under a grant generously funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. The records pertain to Dutch and English colonial settlements in New York City, western Long Island, and the lower Hudson Valley.

Families have a sense of themselves. Who they are, where they came from, how they came to be the group they are now. It’s a sense of identity. Many African Americans today are exploring their genealogy but can only go so far because of the legacy of slavery in America and a past obscured by the lack of records. However, there are records in the Municipal Archives that might help fill this knowledge gap. One collection is the Old Town Records, which includes documentation of manumissions and slave births in New York City. While the information may not be new, access to it over the years has been limited. This is changing thanks to a new digitization project. With a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the Municipal Archives has been processing the collection. It is comprised of records created in the villages and towns that were eventually consolidated into the Greater City of New York in 1898. They date back to the 1600s and consist of deeds, minutes from town boards and meetings, court records, tax records, license books, enumerations of enslaved people, school-district records, city charters, and information on the building of sewers, streets and other infrastructure.

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Manumission of Benjamin Matt by Jacob Hicks, March 4, 1817. Old Town Records, NYC Municipal Archives.

“Manumission” is a legal term that is similar to “emancipation” but slightly different in the way it was performed. Manumission refers to the legal release of enslaved people when slavery is still sanctioned by law, as opposed to emancipation, which follows abolition and releases all people formerly enslaved. Most slave manumissions were conferred by slaveholders who released their slaves either by a living deed of gift or last will and testament. For the Record  examined the subject in The Slow End of Slavery in New York Reflected in Brooklyn’s Old Town Records. Additionally, several collections in the Municipal Archives contain records documenting enslaved people, notably the Common Council Papers. A sampling of NYC Slavery Records can be viewed online in “From the Vaults.”

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Manumission of Nancy by Jeremiah Remsen, June 30, 1820. Old Town Records, NYC Municipal Archives.

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Manumission of Betsey by Gerreta Polhemus, August 29, 1820. Old Town Records, NYC Municipal Archives.

More than 11,000 pages from the 189 Old Town Ledgers have been digitized to date. The digitization is 20% complete and the final count will be exponentially higher at the project’s end. This process can seem slow at times, requiring care for the material that’s being worked on. Sometimes there are opportunities to review the books being worked on and sometimes the entries stick out. This was the case with many manumissions as they were digitized for the collection. Individual names of former slaves along with their former owners are in plain ink on the pages—their lives dramatically changed so many years ago. Most manumissions are only a few simple lines of text, yet their ramifications are so powerful.

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Manumission of Sylvia by John Van Nostrand, April 10, 1799. Old Town Records, NYC Municipal Archives.

I’m not African American but I am a New Yorker. I’ve lived in Brooklyn for over twenty years and am familiar with the city’s history. I was aware of the city’s past connections to slavery but I had never seen written evidence of it until I began digitizing the records of places I walk through so often—Bushwick, Gravesend, Sheepshead Bay and other locations. People of all heritages live in these places now, but at the time the manumissions were written these were small farm towns and slavery was common. It is easy for that past to never come to mind; it’s a stretch of imagination to envision the humble towns they were when walking in the urban centers they have become. But that past is very real and the people in the Old Town Records Collection walked many of the same streets we walk today. It is possible their distant relatives may also tread those same streets and not know the connection to their past.

I recently saw similar records of emancipation change how a person thought about herself. After I had been digitizing this material during the day I put on Finding Your Roots, a popular TV show about genealogy on PBS. [https://www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots/] The program has aired over eight seasons and has previously consulted the Municipal Archives to research its guests’ histories.

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Manumission of Phillis by Joseph Fox July 11, 1812, and Dianna Orange by Nicholas Beorum, April 12, 1813. Old Town Records, NYC Municipal Archives.

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Manumission of Cornelia Brown by Andrew Mercein, April 13, 1813. Old Town Records, NYC Municipal Archives.

This was an episode that featured the musician/actress Queen Latifah and as the story of her heritage unfolded she found some of her ancestors had been manumitted from slavery. The documents presented on the show were from another state and another archive but their value was the same as the lines of text I had digitized during the day. It was freedom; it was another life; it was a new beginning for that person and their family. Those events occurred so long ago and as Queen Latifah read out the words for the camera she had no idea this had ever happened. [https://www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots/watch/extras/queen-latifah-meets-the-woman-that-freed-her-ancestors]. As she talked about what she read she noted that it changed the way she thought about herself, her own personal struggles and how she thought of her family. She was eager to share that information with the people she holds dear. Her whole family would see their history differently. They would see themselves differently. A family that didn’t previously know their past, a family that didn’t know with whom or when their freedom came would now have an entire history opened up by a few lines of writing found in a book in an archive. As the TV show played I reflected on the digitization I perform and knew the same impact is possible through the Old Town Records Collection. The way entire families see and know themselves could shift in an instant from the few words the Municipal Archives makes electronically accessible.

Many things shape family identity but few are as profound and long lasting as information. Personal past. Collective past. They can shape who you are, who you think you are and who you can be. Who an entire family can be. The wider availability of the Old Town Records Collection has the potential to do that for so many families who research their genealogy. We can look forward to more Americans finding themselves.

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Manumission of Margarett by Anna Vanderbilt, September 4, 1820. Old Town Records, NYC Municipal Archives.

The Eastern District of Brooklyn

There is, in the Municipal Library, a charming tome titled The Eastern District of Brooklyn with Illustrations and Maps. Published on May 7, 1912, its author, Eugene L. Armbruster, was a preservationist long before that was a recognized field. An immigrant from Germany to the United States, he devoted years to documenting Long Island (which included Brooklyn and Queens) with photographs, pamphlets and other publications. Thousands of his photos are in collections at the New York Historical Society, the Brooklyn Public Library and the Queens Public Library.

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Ferry Landing, Grand Street, Williamsburgh, 1835. Illustration from The Eastern District of Brooklyn with Illustrations and Maps, 1912. NYC Municipal Library.

Armbruster frequently answered questions posed by readers of The Brooklyn Eagle in a section of the paper titled “Questions Answered by the Eagle.” This idiosyncratic feature contained a hodge-podge of information in response to inquiries such as, “Is there a Shenandoah in New York?” submitted by BLANK…. Yes, in Dutchess County.  “What is meant by the seven ages of man and who was the author?” posed by Mrs. D.H. … It’s from As You Like It by William Shakespeare spoken by the Duke in Act 2 (although the better-known portion of that speech is “all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players”). Labeled “the local expert on Brooklyn history,” Armbruster fielded questions related to events and places in Brooklyn, such as the original location of Litchfield Mansion. Right where it remains at 5th and 9th Ave., also known as Prospect Park West.

The book itself is tiny, about the size of a box of notecards but it contains a host of information in its series of brief sketches, appendices and hand-drawn illustrations and maps. The titles themselves are beguiling: a settlement named Cripplebush, one appendix titled, “The Solid Men of Williamsburg, 1847,” and the illustration listed as Literary Emporium. Is there such flora as a cripplebush and if so, what does it look like? Were the Williamsburg men particularly chunky? Was the emporium a bookstore or early library?  The answers lie ahead.

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Junction of Broadway, Flushing and Graham Avenues. Illustration from The Eastern District of Brooklyn with Illustrations and Maps, 1912. NYC Municipal Library.

Written shortly after the consolidation of the Greater City in 1898, the author intended to provide an overview of the Eastern District of Brooklyn to assist future historians. “If a history of the City of New York will ever be written, its compiler will look around for historical matter relating to the old towns, now forming parts of the metropolis, and this book was written that the Eastern District of Brooklyn may be represented then. But, what exactly is this Eastern District? Armbruster explained that during an earlier Kings County consolidation, the towns of Williamsburg, Bushwick and North Brooklyn were combined into the Eastern District. There also was a Western District that “included the remainder of the enlarged city” which was the portion of Kings County that comprised the City of Brooklyn. But that’s not all. There was a “sparsely settled” 9th ward between the two districts and a 26th ward that “was never a part of the Western District, but a town by itself until annexed in 1886 by the late City of Brooklyn.” Clear as mud!  

Suffice it to say that the book is about a series of settlements that became villages, towns and cities between 1638 and 1910. These include what are now Ridgewood and Long Island City (now in Queens), Bushwick, Greenpoint, Williamsburg and East New York. The boundaries of the settlements shifted based on grants issued by the West India Company, colonial governments and eventually through Acts of the State Legislature.   

Armbruster appears not to have accessed primary source documents and instead relied on several historical analyses. Mostly but not entirely written in the mid-to late 19th  century, the authors include Henry R. Stiles, a physician and historian who penned the multi-volumed The Civil, political, professional and ecclesiastical history, and commercial and industrial record of the County of Kings and the City of Brooklyn, N.Y. from 1683 to 1884, and E.B. O’Callaghan who is best known for his (flawed) translation of original Dutch government and West India Company records.

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Burr & Waterman’s Block Factory, Kent Avenue and South 8th Streets, 1852. This factory made “patent blocks” bricks of patented designs that were stamped with a company logo. Illustration from The Eastern District of Brooklyn with Illustrations and Maps, 1912. NYC Municipal Library.

One issue with the writing is the description of Native Americans in derogatory terms that are based on a versioning of history in which the European settlers were beneficent and the original residents of the land somehow miscreants. For example: “Over the morass led narrow trails, known to the redskins and the wild beasts, but treacherous to strangers.”  Even when reporting on the murder of Native American families ordered by the Director General Willem Kieft, Armbruster maintains this form.  

“In an evil hour Kieft ordered some of his men to the tobacco-pipe-land and another band to the Indian village, Rechtauk, situated two miles north of the fort on the East River (the present Corlear’s Hook), while both places were occupied by some fugitive Wesquaesgeek Indians, and had them cruelly slaughtered, men women and children, under cover of night. When the savages found out that  the white men had committed the outrage, which they had first believed to be the work of an hostile Indian tribe about a dozen of the neighboring tribes of River Indians rose up against them and attacked the several plantations.” Who, one asks, should be more appropriately termed savage?

He devotes a brief chapter to the town records of Bushwick (Boswijck from “bos,” meaning a collection of small things packed close together, and from “wijk”—retreat, refuge, guard, defend from danger). This topic interests researchers and staff at the Municipal Archives. “When Bushwick became part of the City of Brooklyn the records were, in accordance with an article of the charter of the enlarged city, deposited in the City Hall. They were sent there in a movable bookcase, which was coveted by some municipal officer, who turned its contents upon the floor, whence the janitor transferred them to the papermill.”

Not all went to the papermill.  The Municipal Archives collections includes the Old Town records which includes 60 volumes from the towns and villages in Kings County during the Dutch and English colonial periods.

In one beautifully written paragraph, Armbruster describes the rise and fall of the four mile stretch of Nassau River, known at the time of publication and today as Newtown Creek. “In the background were the hills covered with trees…  At that time the creek, with the several gristmills, and the farms bordering thereon, differed in no way from the rural scenes, which are often seen as typical of Holland, except for the hills in the background. But since then the mills have vanished and factories and coal yards have taken their places and commercialism in general, with no eye for landscape beauty has taken hold of the territory. The water of the creek has been polluted to such a degree that the name of Newtown Creek has come into ill-repute, and it is well that the waterway, when cleansed and improved, will be known by the euphonious name of Nassau River.

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Williamsburgh Gas Works Office, 93 South 7th Street, 1852. Illustration from The Eastern District of Brooklyn with Illustrations and Maps, 1912. NYC Municipal Library.

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Phoenix Iron Works, 230 Grand Street, 1852. Illustration from The Eastern District of Brooklyn with Illustrations and Maps, 1912. NYC Municipal Library.

On the list of federal Superfund sites for the past decade, perhaps when the Environmental Protection Agency does undertake cleaning up the toxic waste, Newtown Creek will be again named Nassau River.

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Map of the area north of Newtown Creek. Illustration from The Eastern District of Brooklyn with Illustrations and Maps, 1912. NYC Municipal Library.

The appendices include three sections providing census information. Number 9 from the Census of Kings County circa 1698, lists the names of freeholders, and enumerates their family members, apprentices and enslaved people within Kings County “on Nassauw Island.” There were 51 freeholders, including four women. Eleven were of French ancestry; one was English and the remaining 39 were Dutch. In addition to the freeholders there were 49 women (presumed wives) 141 children, 8 apprentices and 52 enslaved people.

Appendix Number 12 provides the number of all inhabitants in the Township of  Bushwyck, male and female; black and white, in 1738. The total of 325 “Ziele” (souls) listed 41 freeholders, including six women. There were 119 white males; 130 white females, 42 black males and 36 black females.

Appendix 13 offers a list of householders in one district of Bushwick. The 22 householders enslaved 20 men and 21 women.

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A list of all the Inhabitants of the Township of Bushwick-Both White and Black-Males and Females, in 1738. An illustration from The Eastern District of Brooklyn with Illustrations and Maps, 1912. Appendix XII. NYC Municipal Library.

This data shows that the colonial households and economy of Bushwick grew increasingly reliant on slave labor. The 1698 census shows that 21 households included enslaved people and five of the 30 remaining households listed  apprentices. By 1738, 25 of the 41 households in the census listed black residents, who we presume were enslaved.

And now, to our initial questions.

Cripplebush was an area of land that stretched from Wallabout Bay to Newtown Creek and so named because of the thick scrub oak that flourished there, which the Dutch called kreupelbosch meaning thicket. The actual hamlet, which received a patent in 1654 was located around what today is South Williamsburg, just north of the Marcy Houses operated by NYCHA.

In 1847, a publication was issued listing the men of  Williamsburgh and City of Brooklyn who owned $10,000 or more in personal property or real estate. The Solid Men of Williamsburgh refers to the 44 men living in that town who met this economic threshold.

As for the Literary Emporium—who knows.  The illustration does not offer a clue as to its purpose.

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Literary Emporium, corner of 5th and Grand Streets, 1852. Illustration from The Eastern District of Brooklyn with Illustrations and Maps, 1912. NYC Municipal Library.