Sunday, August 21, 2011

Name Index for New York Quaker meetings

Swarthmore College has an excellent website for Quaker records. It is just this kind of information that is valuable and accessible that needs to be used and publicized. While it can be kind of fun to order microfilms of Quaker meetings and to pore through the meeting minutes, learning about the people who were "mou" (married out of unity) and/or dismissed, it is certainly time-consuming and is not guaranteed to yield the precise names you are looking for. Swarthmore College has an excellent index of many such microfilms for New York Quakers, but even better, James E. Hazard has indexed all records of New York meetings by the names of the people mentioned at them.Just by looking at these detailed indexes, you may be able to find the vital (or other) records you are looking for.
I can see, for example, when I look at the index for Galway Monthly Meeting,  that Mary Ann Close is "dec"." in 1861. I can also see that she is daughter of Nathaniel and Cynthia Brown, and that she was of Mayfield. By checking abbreviations against a glossary on the website, I see that "dec" means "deceased." The year and month of the record are also listed. So without ordering or reading a single microfilm, I can get some good information for a family tree. If you know you had Quaker ancestors in New York, you will want to take a look at this index. The indexes can be found at the Hazard Project: http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/friends/hazard/index.html.
 (http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/friends/hazard/fhlreport.php).

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