Research


Custodial History

About 1850 the Secretary of State's Office, under the supervision of E.B. O'Callaghan, arranged these records chronologically and bound them into 103 volumes entitled "N.Y. Colonial Manuscripts." Documents in the first 101 volumes were individually listed in O'Callaghan's Calendar of Historical Manuscripts in the Office of the Secretary of State (1866). This series consists of volumes 22 and 24-102, except for those destroyed by the state capitol fire of 1911 (volumes destroyed were 30-33, 43, 64-69, 71-73, 92, 94-95, 97-98, and 103).

Several surviving volumes suffered severe burn damage in the fire: volumes 44, 46-48, 70, 74-78, 83, 88-91, 93, 96, and 99-102. Of these, 17 volumes (44, 46, 47, 48, 70, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 90, 91, 93, 96, 99, 100, 101) were too extensively damaged to be microfilmed. Some documents have been rebound into 144 volumes; the rest have remained disbound since the 1911 fire.

Several notable items (described above) were removed from the series as part of the Freedom Train exhibit that traveled the state from January 1949 to February 1950 (L. 1948, Ch. 659).

A1894-98: This accretion resulted from a project by Archives staff in 1998 to integrate or accession estrayed or unidentified records.