Genealogy and Local History in the Folklife Center, Grandall Public Library, Glens Falls, NY

The Folklife Center, an uncommon collection of books, manuscripts, photographs, and ephemera from the history of upstate New York, has emerged as a hidden gem in the basement of Crandall Public Library in Glens Falls. It has been the recipient of awards including the New York State Archives “Annual Archives Award” for Program Excellence in a Historical Records Repository (2001) and the State Education Department Certificate of Merit for “Superior leadership and initiative in developing an archival program providing excellent service to local government and to citizens.”

History & Collections

The Folklife Center traces its beginnings to the books donated in the 1890s by local historians Austin Wells Holden and his son, James Austin Holden. They gave the library their collection of books on American history, with emphasis on the Revolution and the Civil War, to be housed in a special alcove and called it the Americana Collection.

Several incarnations later, the Folklife Center now occupies an attractive reading room with adjoining work space and climate controlled archival storage. In a bow to its early donors, the book collection is called the Holden Collection. The Folklife Gallery provides the setting for exhibits ranging from World War II and Glens Falls to Foodways – Exploring the Local.

The collections now include not only a much-enlarged book collection but also periodicals, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and vertical files.

Folklife Center photographs (25+ collections, comprising some 61,000 images) have been used in film documentaries, on signage for local events and municipal roads and trails, in student papers, historical publications, and by residents looking for pictures of houses or relatives. Photos range in type from glass plate negatives, to prints, to modern negatives, to lantern slides, postcards and digital files. They include family albums, construction project documentation, pictures taken for the local newspapers, two moderately large collections of local photographs (2,000-4,000 images each), and all the photographers’ proofs for the Look Magazine series which portrayed Glens Falls as “Hometown USA” during the Second World War. The earliest photograph collections date to the end of the Civil War, and photographs continue to be accessioned.

Maps can provide both specific information and larger context for family historians. Among the most useful maps for genealogists and local historians are the 1905 Sanborn maps for Glens Falls and Sandy Hill (Hudson Falls) in book form, and a series of other local Sanborn maps on microfilm.

Sanborn maps were created for the fire insurance industry and show the location and building material type of every building in town — along with the location of fire hydrants and water tanks and the direction of prevailing winds. Seeing the actual footprint of a home or business on a Sanborn map can be thrilling and instructive. A good series of street maps of Glens Falls for the first half of the twentieth century, and a number of historic Adirondack Park maps round out the collection. The Caffry Collection consists of about a dozen framed historic maps and views of Glens Falls and Warren County which hang in the reading room. Four large maps in this collection, dating from 1858 to 1875, show the location of houses and businesses and the names of owners or occupants. These can supplement City Directory information, which only goes back to 1874. Overall, the map collection contains 1,200+ maps, about half of which are USGS topographical maps.

The manuscript collections include personal papers and the papers of local organizations, particularly women’s groups (Zonta, Woman’s National Farm and Garden, and Glens Falls Club of College Women, to name a few). There is a small collection of account books from nineteenth century local businesses, and a large collection of scrapbooks. Family genealogies or genealogical resources
such as church or cemetery records make up another portion of the manuscript collections.

Recently a patron came in to look through the Glens Falls Community Theatre records to find a picture of her mother-in-law as a slave girl in a production of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” in 1972. Then she brought her husband and his mother, who uses a wheelchair, to see what she had found! New collections which were received this year include “Irish Families of Glens Falls,” “Fighting the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Site in Washington County,” and the papers of the Glens Falls Hospital Guild.

The periodical collection ranges from genealogy (NEHGS, NYG&BS, DAR, etc.) through local historical society publications to regional and specialized folklife titles. Of unique interest are the historic newspapers which are either in hard copy or on microfilm. Certain individual items date back to the 1830s.

Family genealogies both published and donated, local histories of the towns and counties around Glens Falls, city directories, high school yearbooks, shelves of cemetery transcriptions — the Folklife Center has all these as well as collections centered on the French and Indian War, the Revolution, and the Civil War. There is a collection (about 12 linear feet) of cookbooks issued by local churches, fire departments, and other organizations, arranged geographically, as well as a smaller set of “old” cookbooks. These are used by students and “foodies.”

For genealogists, cemetery transcriptions can provide key clues in a family’s history. The Folklife Center has about 15 linear feet of cemetery transcriptions from Warren, Washington, and Saratoga Counties. This includes large cemeteries, such as Pine View and Bay Street in Glens Falls, Union in Fort Edward, and scores of small rural cemeteries. There are also records of cemeteries which no longer exist: the old West Street cemetery in Glens Falls, and the 28 cemeteries which were moved before the Sacandaga Reservoir drowned their former locations.

The Folklife Center is one of only about half a dozen repositories in the state which has the New York State Vital Records Index on microfiche. Dating back to 1881 and coming forward to 1961 for deaths and marriages and 1936 for births, this index covers all of New York State except New York City. Starting in 1881, town clerks were required to file original certificates of vital events with the state and retain a copy for the town records. The index gives the name of the person, the town in which the event took place, the date and the state certificate number.

An important supplement to civil vital records are church records which can fill in gaps in the records and which may go back much further than the state records. The American-Canadian Genealogical Society has been doing a wonderful job of transcribing and publishing the records of the French Catholic churches in New England and New York and we have those for our area. In addition the Folklife Center has unpublished records of Christ United Methodist, the oldest Methodist church in Glens Falls, and DAR transcriptions of records for some churches in Hudson Falls and Fort Edward (various Protestant denominations and Society of Friends).

City directories are an astonishing fount of personal information. The Glens Falls City Directories, which also include South Glens Falls, Hudson Falls, and Fort Edward, span the years from 1874 to 1981, after which they were supplanted by phone books. Directories list all the men and all the employed or widowed women in the town, with address, occupation and a code which tells whether they own or rent their dwelling. Widows are listed under their first name, with a note “widow of _____.” For most years there is a street index which allows the researcher to look up a street address and see who owned the house. In some cases, when a person had been listed in a previous directory, the current directory will note where the person had moved to (“Removed to New York City”) or when he or she died.

The Folklife Center has 42 linear feet of high school yearbooks, which are used by reunion organizers, adoptees, and family researchers.

The vertical files fall into three categories: Biographical files (8 drawers), Glens Falls/Queensbury subject files (16 drawers), and Regional subject files (12 drawers). The biographical files (surname files) contain clippings, obituaries, pamphlets, unpublished genealogy records and notes — and whatever else we happen to have on a particular surname. The subject files contain information on businesses, organizations, churches, historical events, and so on.

The book collection includes many treasures. One patron comes in once a week for several hours to read and take notes on The Sir William Johnson Papers, a 14-volume set of the correspondence, reports, etc., of Sir William Johnson (1715-1774), who was a distinguished military commander in the French and Indian War and a major landowner in the Mohawk Valley. Another extraordinary set of books, particularly for a library of this size, is the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, which was part of the original Holden donation. While online versions of this massive historic work (128 volumes) now exist, using the original volumes to read the battle reports and letters can provide a very special feeling to a researcher. With the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War this year, the Center expects increased interest in the Civil War holdings including Official Records, the Adjutant General’s Reports, and Austin W. Holden’s letters from the battlefront to his wife and son (in the Manuscript collection).

The library provides access to databases including Ancestry Library Edition and Heritage Quest. In 2010 the Folklife Center has given workshops on “Family History 101,” “Using Ancestry.LE,” and on caring for your own collections, identifying family photographs, and scanning family photographs. The Center has also hosted tours for homeschooled children, librarians, teachers from Russia, students from Japan, and Tiger Cub Scouts learning about “culture.”

In addition to genealogists, the Folklife Center, which is fully accessible, serves patrons of all ages, and of a wide range of interests, from grade-school students researching Indian food to octogenarians researching eighteenth-century military roads. The content of the collections, and the help of the knowledgeable staff, combine to make this a unique resource for historians of all stripes. It is truly a gem.

The Folklife Center is open 10 am–12 noon and 1 pm–4 pm, Monday through Friday, and Tuesday evening 5 pm–8 pm. We can be reached at 518-792-6508, ext. 239, and eburke@sals.edu. You may also visit the Crandall Library website.

Erica Wolfe Burke, BA, MLS, is the Archivist and Special Collections Librarian of the Crandall Public Library Folklife Center. A native of New York City, she lives in Hartford, NY, with her husband and daughter.

by Erica Wolf Burke, MLS

Originally published in The New York Researcher, Summer 2011

© 2011 The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society

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