A Community History Project

The Colonial Albany Social History Project is a model community history program that seeks to comprehend the life his­tory (from birth to death) of the 16,000 people who lived in the city of Albany prior to 1800 and to interpret and com­municate this new historical knowledge to both scholarly and popular audi­ences.

Albany was an ethnically and reli­giously diverse, commercially oriented, community. To date, however, the his­tory of early Albany has been written with little knowledge of the life experi­ences of a majority of the people who resided in the city. Traditional works have been based on the records of the most extraordinary members of the community—the Schuyler family for ex­ample—or of outsiders whose percep­tions of the community were colored by the purpose of their visit.

The research effort of the Colonial Albany Project begins with a family re­constitution program that proceeds for­ward from the first seventeenth-century settlers and comprehends changes in community demographics until the year 1800. This admittedly arbitrary date marks the transition from the pre-in­dustrial age to Albany’s rise as a modern urban center.

The historical records that form the foundation of the CAP research design include baptism, marriage, and burial records from Albany’s five churches, property records, and city government records, as well as any kind of survey resource. Lists of names were generated for a variety of purposes: city censuses, tax assessments, city directories, lists of voters, license holders, jury members, church pew holders, lists of debtors and paupers. These documents provide a snapshot of a portion of the community at a moment in time. Often they include a diverse number of individuals—men and women, rich and poor, white and black.

Each record is searched to exhaus­tion. All information in that source re­lating to any person of early Albany must be recorded. Information pertain­ing to each individual is grouped under the names of the more than 300 defin­able families of seventeenth- and eigh­teenth-century Albany. We also have created a series of subfiles. These include: a real estate file, a file of wills, letters of administration, estate inven­tories, and a graphics archive.

Since the project’s inception in 1980, almost 100 undergraduates and volun­teers have completed a detailed, super­vised program of basic training in social history research in community history records. The typical student intern is a senior history major from an Albany­ area college or university who is re­quired to work at least 100 hours in residence at the project. The project also has attracted a growing number of adult volunteers, people seeking to uti­lize their undergraduate or graduate degrees in history. During the spring of 1986, over twenty student interns and volunteers were active collecting infor­mation from historical records.

To manage the records resources generated by this research program, the CAP employs the SPIRES database management system located at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. This computer data­base now contains over 6,500 individual biographical cases. Each case consists of demographic information relating to an Albany resident’s date and place of birth, death, and marriage, the names of parents and spouse, his or her ap­pearance on community census records or tax lists, information on occupation, property holding, and place of resi­dence within the city, and the existence of wills or visuals relating to that indi­vidual.

The Colonial Albany Project seeks to combine the people-focused approach to research of the new social history with the accessibility and community service programming of today’s public history. In 1985, the project produced its first community history calendar focused on the lives of twelve women of early Alba­ny. Project staff also have developed an exhibit program and lecture series high­lighting the 300th anniversary of the granting of the Albany city charter.

Furthermore, a publication designed for a general audience explains the sig­nificance of the city charter for the people of Albany. Map resources and property records in the project collec­tion have enabled a historical artist to create an overview diagram of Albany in 1686 as well as a series of community life scenes. In May 1986, the annual Conference on New York State History included a session on community his­tory devoted to the Colonial Albany Project.

Current research efforts focus on the community of fur traders at Albany, the character of political leadership as the community evolved during the seven­teenth century, and a socio-economic analysis of the city’s work force and occupational and residential mobility in the early nineteenth century. The CAP also supports a documentary editing project to produce a volume of previ­ously unprinted Albany common coun­cil records for the years 1787-1803.

The Colonial Albany Project seeks to share both the results of its research and its experience in programming and community service. The techniques of data collection and records linkage that we employ have application to the study of other pre-industrial communities. As a service program of the Division of Research and Collections of the New York State Museum, the Colonial Alba­ny Project cooperates with other institu­tions and groups to provide programming and  educational opportunities that focus on the people of early Ameri­ca in historical perspective. The CAP has developed a comprehensive  guide to its research and programming ef­forts. A copy of the guide is available upon request. For further information contact: Colonial Albany Project; 3093 Cultural Education Center; Albany, NY 12230; 518/474-6917.