Research

Scope and Content Note

Before roughly 1720, many types of documents were recorded: deeds between private parties, including bargain and sale deeds; deeds of trust, partition, and gift; and mortgage deeds. Most of the deeds and mortgages pertain to lands in New York City and Long Island. (A few are confirmations of Dutch land grants made prior to 1664.) There are also conveyances of real property in remote parts of the colony of New York that were part of the royal grant to the Duke of York in 1664, including New Jersey, Delaware, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, other islands, and part of Maine. Some conveyances relate to lands in other English colonies such as Bermuda, Jamaica, and other Caribbean islands. Official documents include a few letters and land grants from James, Duke of York; orders and commissions issued by the governor; a few executive pardons; and letters of denization (a form of naturalization, all prior to 1709).

Many other recorded documents concern private business affairs. They include contracts (many relating to maritime commerce, and a few to enslaved persons), powers of attorney, some wills and estate inventories, and a few marriage agreements. In the years around 1700 there are many licenses to marry, to teach school, to practice medicine, to engage in whaling, to erect a church, or to serve as a minister of the Gospel.

About a third of Book 1 is a private ledger of accounts, 1652-1654, kept in England for sales of cloth to merchants residing in Hamburg, Bremen, and other cities in northern Europe. Books 2-3 contain documents relating mostly to Long Island. They include deeds, settlements of land and boundary disputes, civil and military commissions and appointments, and many Indian deeds and a few treaties, dating from roughly 1648-1669. Almost all of the latter pertain to Long Island, but there are also recorded copies of the treaty between Gov. Richard Nicolls and the Esopus Indians, 1665, and a few Indian deeds for the Albany area.

After roughly 1720 and until the end of the Revolutionary War the series is almost entirely a record of deeds, mortgages, and powers of attorney. Commissions of civil officers were recorded during the British military occupation of New York City, 1776-1783. Starting in 1782 the series was labeled "Miscellaneous Records," to reflect its more diverse contents. It now included not only deeds and mortgages, but also a wide variety of other documents. Some of the deeds are accompanied by maps. Almost all of the conveyances recorded after 1798 had one party residing out-of-state or out-of-country. Many of the deeds and related documents pertain to large land tracts in the northern, central, and western parts of the state.

The post-1800 books also contain patentees' assignments of patents (land grants); State Comptroller's deeds for lands sold by the state for non-payment of real property taxes; and descriptions of properties acquired by the United States government for lighthouses. Books 22-24 contain numerous assignments by Revolutionary War veterans of their rights to military bounty land grants, recorded by the Secretary of State pursuant to a 1784 law (Chapter 63). Miscellaneous documents recorded during the 1780s and 1790s include records of the state board of canvassers for state elections; some appointments of state and local civil officers, including justices of the peace; releases of widows' dower rights; a statistical abstract of the state census of 1786; and names of subscribers to shares of stock in the Northern Inland Lock Navigation Company and the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company.

The series also includes applications to the Regents of the University of the State of New York for charters of academies and copies of the charters, 1788-1855, mostly found in Books 42-43. Laws of 1855, Chapter 471, transferred the recording function from the Secretary of State to the secretary of the Board of Regents, and Regents charters were thereafter recorded in State Archives Record Series 17261. Notices of discovery of gold and silver mines (and other mineral resources) were recorded in this series (as required by Laws of 1789, Chapter 18) until 1839. Thereafter such notices were recorded in State Archives Record Series A0449.