WESTERN NEW YORK LAND TRANSACTIONS

An incredible mass of data, long unavailable to researchers, has been
compiled in a new book, Western New York Land Transactions by Karen E.
Livsey. 

The 472-page volume reports 40,000 land transactions recorded in the
books of the Holland Land Company,  which owned some 3.3 million acres
west of the Genesee River and known as the Holland or Genesee
Purchase. This territory runs from today's Genesee County west to
Erie, Chautauqua and Cattaraugus Counties, and includes such localties
as Buffalo and Batavia. From 1804 to 1824,  many thousands of people
bought land from Holland Land Company.

``The primary use of this book is to associate a name (person) with a
location in a given period of time,'' says Ms. Livsey. The 367 pages
of lists in tiny type give the name, place, and date for each
transaction, type of transaction, and a ``Section, Township, Range''
code for the land in question. From this data, you can figure out if
someone at least owned land at a given place and time. From there you
can dig into local property records or even into the microfilms of the
Holland Land Company Manuscript Preservation Project at the Reed
Library of the State University of New York at Fredonia (which films
are available through interlibrary loan from Reed or from the LDS
Family History Library).

A tremendous amount of information is packed into this volume, an
essential resource for anyone doing serious research into early
families of western New York.  It is fully indexed. If it suffers from
anything, it is its lack of a map or illustration to better explain
and place the section, township, range codings. 

Western New York Land Transactions, clothbound,  will be available in
libraries or directly from Genealogical Publishing Company, Dept. SM,
1001 North Calvert Street, Baltimore, Md., 21202-3897
(1-800-727-6687) at $35 plus $2.50 postage and handling.
--JFS

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