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Custodial History

The documents in this series were arranged and classified by Frederic G. Mather under the direction of comptroller James A. Roberts pursuant to legislation of 1896. The arrangement reflects the military and civil organization of the state during the Revolutionary War. Often documents of different origin and type were grouped together, as is the case with documents pertaining to the regiments of the Continental Line, the Levies, and the Militia; other groups of documents were kept intact as originally created.

In 1910 the volumes of mounted documents, numbered 1-52 (several had multiple parts making the physical number of volumes 55), were transferred to the New York State Library, then located in the State Capitol Building. About 60 percent of the documents were destroyed in the Capitol Fire of 1911; many others suffered varying degrees of burn damage. Many have since been repaired, but some are severely damaged. The fire and subsequent repair work caused some disarrangement of the order established by the comptroller in the 1890s. The fire burned off folio numbers, making it impossible to fully reestablish that order. New York in the Revolution as Colony and State (Comptroller's Office, Albany, 1904) contains a detailed table of contents of the original 52 volumes.