New York Genealogical and Biographical Track

Looking for Your New York Tenant Farmers: Little-used Resources

Jane E. Wilcox

Thursday, 8 May 2014, 9:30 a.m., T217

Sponsored by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society

Did you know much of New York landholding during the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries was manorial or patentee, with a few landlords holding vast tracts of land on which numerous tenants farmed smaller parcels? If you have these tenant farmers as ancestors, you may be frustrated trying to find them in the more widely-known New York resources such as church, surrogates and land records. There is good news: records from the major manors have survived which may help you in your search.

In this session we will briefly touch on the history of manors and the major events that took place for tenants (including two anti-rent wars in which even a sheriff was shot and killed!) and then explore what typical tenant leases contained from Philipsburgh Manor, Cortlandt Manor, Philipse Highland Patent, Beekman Patent, Livingston Manor and Rensselaerswyck—going up the east side of the Hudson River from Westchester to Putnam to Dutchess to Columbia to Rensselaer counties and over to Albany County.   We will see what records were generated because of the lease-holding land system, including rent ledgers, surveys, receipts, court records (in particular, ejectment proceedings), taxes (yes, they also had to pay taxes on the property) and more. Finally we’ll take a look at where these records—mostly original documents and some in Dutch—are located.

Van Rensselaer Manor Records, New York State Library
Manuscripts and Special Collections, Albany, N.Y.

Jane E. Wilcox specializes in colonial British New York and early nineteenth century New York research.

New York Genealogical and Biographical Track