Just for fun, I played around with a Google Programmable Search Engine and made this. It is an unadorned search box; no bells, whistles, graphics, or logos. It drills into over 45 websites and digital collections that feature Buffalo buildings, old newspapers, genealogy, events, and other local/historic stuff.
One of these days, I’ll pony up for the full business-class subscription to WordPress so I can use a plug-in to embed this thing. Feedback welcome. It is a work in progress.
Illustration of St. John’s Protectory and St. Joseph’s Asylum, better known today as Father Baker’s, from the F.W. Beers Atlas of Erie County, 1880, courtesy of the New York Public Library. At the time, Lackawanna, NY had not yet been established as a city, so this institution was in West Seneca.
Cholera and other epidemics, maternal mortality, military service, dangerous factory conditions, fires and floods, diseases that are curable today: there are many reasons why children lost one or both parents in 19th century Buffalo.
In response, men, women, and religious congregations and orders established asylums to house and care for orphaned infants and children.
Below is what we’ve been able to find about orphanages that existed in Buffalo and Erie County, N.Y and their records. We focused on institutions that were authorized to place children in new families with new identities. We omitted residential facilities who served children but preserved their birth family relationships. Did we omit one? Are there records that we missed? Names or nicknames that these institutions were also known as? Other errors? Please let us know!
No Records Found means that we were unable to identify any public repositories with surviving records of the children served by this institution. These records may have been discarded or they may be in the hands of an organization with private archives. Sometimes by-laws, constitutions, minutes, and annual reports are the only records that survive.
The era of residential orphan homes ended around World War II, to be replaced by the foster care system.
Related links:
One of the most obscure departments in New York State government, unless you are a historian or genealogist, is the New York State Archives (NYSA or State Archives). Even its own homepage does not convey to the casual visitor what, exactly, it does.
The NYSA does not, for example, collect cool stuff about New York State and its communities from wherever it may be found: books, newspapers, maps, scrapbooks, letters, diaries, your attic. That is the role of the New York State Library (NYSL).
While you might learn a lot about businesses, nonprofits, families, and more at the State Archives, it does not collect records created by businesses, nonprofits, families, or any other non-governmental entities. This distinction is important.
The primary role of the State Archives is to house and make available the records of New York State government after they are no longer needed for everyday business.
The primary role of the State Archives is to house and make available the records of New York State government after they are no longer needed for everyday business. There are about 3 centuries of government records from the colonial era to the present in the State Archives.
The secondary role of the State Archives is to oversee and standardize government record-keeping practices in the counties, cities, towns, villages, school districts, police & fire departments, etc., in New York State. They have additional duties, but today we’re going to focus on their role regulating local government records.
Let me pause here to make a distinction between a record and a publication.
Let me pause here to make a distinction between a record and a publication.
For the purpose of this essay, a record is the kind of stuff those of us with office jobs generate all day long: emails, spreadsheets, schedules, budget proposals, payrolls, memos, statistics, sign-in sheets, strategic plans, procedural manuals, Powerpoints, databases, and so on. These are not usually designed for public consumption, so we can also call them unpublished records. New York State is proactively putting a lot of born-digital records online (publishing them) at its Open Data Portal. Plus, the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) enables citizens to request unpublished records from their governments.
A publication or government publication is a document designed and released by a government department for public comment and consumption, such as an annual report, a budget, a revitalization plan, a recycling guide, council meeting minutes, an environmental impact statement. Unlike records, publications issued by state & local governments and commercial publishers end up in the New York State Library.
Let’s look back to 1971. This is when the State Archives was established as an official department of New York. The state of New York had no formal, centralized government record-keeping function until 50 years ago, making it a relative newcomer in Albany. Here is the condition of record-keeping in New York in 1912.
The state of New York had no official, centralized government record-keeping department until 50 years ago, making it a relative newcomer in Albany.
When the State Archives was founded, it was authorized to develop records retention schedules: legally binding rules about how long certain kinds of government records must be kept. For example, vital records must be kept in perpetuity. Your mileage log, if you have a government job that requires travel? Probably not in perpetuity. These record retention schedules apply equally to all counties, cities, towns, and villages in New York.
Before 1971, elected and appointed officials and civil servants in New York more or less decided on their own what to keep or toss. Even today, there are people in local government who are not well-trained in the record-keeping requirements pertaining to their job or department and they unilaterally delete or discard files.
Say you work in a public school somewhere in NY State and you find an ancient attendance ledger in a closet. You might be inspired, with the best of intentions, to offer it to the nearest historical organization. And you’d be wrong. Your school district has a records management officer who must first be consulted about that ledger, because it is public property and isn’t yours to dispose of. In cities, towns & villages, the city, town, or village clerk is the records management officer.
This is a very long way of explaining why local government offices might not have the records you are expecting to find. And why “there must have been a fire” is a convenient explanation, even when it is false. Sometimes it means Oops, someone threw that stuff out.
Disclaimer: I have no connection to Archive.org beyond than having a free account and being acquainted with one of their employees.
Most of my readers already know about Archive.org, also known as the Internet Archive, as a place to find cool old stuff online. While I spend my time with their full-text, online books, Archive.org also offers audio and video, including TV, films, and concert tapes. Patents. Podcasts. Census microfilms. Outdated software. Plus the magnificent Wayback Machine, which has been crawling the web and saving websites for 25 years.
Here’s another service they offer: community uploading. Anyone may register for a free account and start contributing their stuff. From their Help screen:
Having an Archive.org account allows you to:
excerpt From: Accounts – A Basic Guide
Upload files to the site
Have collections for your uploads (50 items minimum required)
Borrow books from the lending library
Leave reviews
Participate in forums
View and use some items that are restricted
Receive monthly newsletters and event notices
Why is this important? A lot of individuals and groups — now that we all create and accumulate digital property without even trying, let’s call ourselves collectors — are turning to libraries, educational institutions, historical organizations, and museums, asking them to put the collector’s stuff online. It might be photos, letters, or home movies that have or have not been digitized. It might be original essays or artwork by the collector. It might be by-laws, minutes, spreadsheets. It might be articles and downloads that are still protected by copyright.
Some large and well-funded organizations might store or host your digital assets. Smaller organizations, though, rarely have enough server space to digitize collections they already own and have title to. Under the circumstances, they may be simply unable to commit the time and server space to additional stuff.
While server space is definitely cheaper than bricks and mortar storage space, it is not free. Neither is the labor, software, and hardware needed to do all of the processing that makes digital files findable and usable online. Whether it is tangible objects in boxes or digital files on hard drives, we all simply own more stuff than our institutions can possibly house and care for in perpetuity.
Here’s where Archive.org comes in. You or your organization can take out an account and scan and upload. Here’s why I recommend Archive.org:
If you join and start contributing, please donate what you can to offset their server, software and labor costs. Here’s where to sign up.
*A technical term that roughly translates as More than I can count
What we want to do here is help you, the person with local history, family history, or house history questions, get help from libraries, archives, museums, colleges & universities, historical organizations, government record offices, and genealogical societies; all the organizations that might have old stuff. Especially those located somewhere other than where you can visit in person. We’ll refer to them collectively as repositories.
What you think of as a simple request for information is actually a request for labor. If everything was digitized and online, then your search engine results would suffice. The repository you contact probably has to do in-person, by-hand retrievals and searches of pictures, letters, microfilm, maps, or other offline, undigitized stuff to find your answer. Fortunately, they often know of online resources that aren’t found by search engines and may be able to refer you to stuff that you didn’t know was online. Large institutions can tap into proprietary databases to which they subscribe.
Most historical & genealogical organizations are small and have no paid staff. Sometimes they don’t have enough volunteers to keep up with inquiries. Their volunteers may be staying home in the pandemic.
Having a big budget doesn’t always solve this problem. Large, high-profile institutions get a correspondingly high volume of requests. Their staff may be laid off or working from home during the pandemic. We know of an Ivy League university who rations the time librarians spend on outside inquiries to 20 minutes per request. They actually use timers.
The desire for free labor will always exceed the supply. Here are five simple tricks to make the most of the limited time that someone can commit to your question.
Reach out by email if possible.
The tweet below explains why Calling a repository on the phone may
not be the ideal way to get the information you are seeking.
| Try This | Rationale |
|---|---|
| 1. Reach out by email if possible. The information you seek probably has to be delivered electronically anyway, so you might as well start out electronically. Google the repository and use their Contact Us page. The repository will then have a legible, searchable written request to work from. They will have the correct spelling of your name and the names of the people or things that you’re researching. It prevents bouncing emails because someone incorrectly spelled out or wrote down an email address over the phone. | When you call with a complex request, you’re not only asking for someone to analyze your needs and determine on the spot if their repository can be of help, you’re also asking them serve as your stenographer. Save the telephone requests for the computer-naive, people with disabilities, and those without internet access. A repository can always ask to speak with you on the phone if it would work better for them. |
| 2. Not sure who can help you at an organization? Pick up to three likely-sounding departments or staffers to send your inquiry to. Trust them to forward it if a co-worker can better answer your question. And give it a few days. Some questions take more time than others. No one has an empty In box. | We understand the temptation to Cc everyone at the Contact Us page as an insurance policy, but it increases the chances that your inquiry will land in spam folders. It also creates extra labor for the person whose help you need. Now they have to acknowledge all the forwards from peers & superiors, which cuts into the time they could be using on your inquiry. |
| 3. Repositories need to figure out what you don’t know about X, not what you do know, in order to determine if they can help you. You do not have to have a lengthy family history narrative ready. Reach out when you’ve identified which gap(s) in your knowledge you hope to rectify. | Government record offices which require next-of-kin relationship to release certain records will let you know. At non-governmental organizations, the individual you’re researching can be your ancestor, or not. The building you’re researching can be your property, or not. No personal connection or recitation of the forebears is required. |
| 4. Focus on up to three life events, or up to three names, or up to three documents per request. For example, “Do you have obituaries for John & Mary Smith?” “Do you have pictures of these three addresses?” Less is more when it comes to getting your request filled. | No one is born knowing how to do family or house history research. Repositories know that and want to help you anyway. But if the only way you can answer questions about what you’re trying to find out about X is “Anything, anything!”, then we suggest starting out with a researcher for hire. |
| 5. When you can finish the sentence, “Well, what I’m really looking for is…”, then you’ve greatly increased the chances that someone can help you. You may even get a hug. | Example: if you want to learn where a factory was located and when it closed down, we encourage you to skip impossibly broad openers such as “Do you have anything on old businesses?” Indirect questions produce indirect answers. |
Bonus tip: Our Guide to Vital and Archival Records in Buffalo and Erie County will help you identify which repository has what you’re looking for.
Originally published at my LinkedIn page in December 2019, then reprinted by BuffaloRising.com with the title Buffalo’s Newest Urban Legend at both sites. Reproduced here with edits and updates. Article about 1863 fire added in January 2022. Image of Buffalo City Hall courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
The assertion first came to my attention in 2018 in the comment section at a popular Buffalo website. Then some folks expressed it to me in person. We may be witnessing the birth of a brand new urban legend in Buffalo, specifically:
“City Hall had a fire and all of the records were destroyed.”
We were talking about doing Buffalo house research when this claim was conveyed to me. My informants then, and those who have expressed it since then, have heard it from landlords, relatives, and contractors at public works projects.
Let’s start at the beginning. For over a decade now, the City of Buffalo has made available online a free searchable property database, which they call the Online Assessment Roll System (OARS).
If you spend much time poking around in OARS, you notice a curious pattern: the majority of houses apparently went up in 1900! Statistically speaking, this just isn’t likely. Buffalo wasn’t built in a year. What’s up with that chronic 1900 build date?
Enter the Fire Theory. Maybe it goes something like this: If that 1900 build date is the wrong information, it must be because City Hall doesn’t have the right information. If City Hall doesn’t have the right information, it must be because records were lost or destroyed. If the records were destroyed, there must have been a fire.
This is a plausible hypothesis. Lots of courthouses and government buildings have suffered catastrophic fires, resulting in losses of all kinds of records. One of the most famous was the 1921 fire in the Commerce Building in Washington, DC, that destroyed the 1890 census. It occurred before the invention of inexpensive reproduction technologies such as microfilm and copy machines, so there were no copies housed (or, as we would say today, backed up) elsewhere. Another was the 1911 State Capitol fire in Albany which destroyed most of the New York State Library collection.
The good news for researchers is that there are two flaws with the Fire Theory.
The good news for researchers is that there are two flaws with the Fire Theory. First flaw: We all know that the little village of Buffalo was burned by the British in the War of 1812, right? After 1812, my research has turned up only two minor fires in City Hall.
The first one was in January 1863. “None of the city records, however were destroyed in the [City Clerk’s] department. We understand that some papers in the Auditor’s and Comptroller’s office were consumed.” The City Clerk is the designated record-keeper for city government. The Assessor’s office, where tax records are kept, was not damaged.
Here it is the only other fire in a Buffalo government building that I could find:
If you have a Newspapers.com subscription, you can now search the full text of Buffalo newspapers from 1811-1923. You will find lots of articles about city hall & courthouse fires in other cities and states, which suggests that when something like this does happen, it makes national news.
This Index of Buffalo Fires, 1850-1977, provided by the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, cites no fires in municipal buildings.
Had a major City Hall fire happened here, it would have had front page headlines. It would have been reported in other cities.
Had a major City Hall fire happened here, it would have had front page headlines. It would have been reported in other cities. It would have been an ongoing story as the scope of damage was assessed, salvage and clean-up began, repair budgets were approved, and so on. A record-destroying catastrophe would be easily substantiated with period sources, like the fact that Buffalo was burned during the War of 1812. Now that we have a growing selection of digitized newspapers, this kind of claim is more easily proved or disproved.
Second flaw with the Fire Theory: A quick look at the records housed in the City of Buffalo Inactive Records Center (this link doesn’t list all of them, just the most in-demand) shows an intact collection of 19th and 20th century records, including tax records dating back to 1814. Had there been a record-destroying fire, surely those tax records would have been lost.
Luckily for researchers, we have two centuries of city records with no chronological gaps. Government websites are usually quite forthcoming about disaster-related record losses, such as this example from Virginia. There is even a page that alerts genealogists to burned counties, none of which have been reported in New York State.
Let’s go back to the mystery of the chronic 1900 build date. At the risk of launching a new and only slightly improved urban legend, here is a hypothesis of my own.
Remember the name of the property database? Online Assessment Roll System. Its purpose is to ensure that the City is taxing property owners legally, correctly, and transparently. It was not designed to be a house history database.
OARs was not designed to be a house history database.
Right here is where I am going to go out on my own theoretical limb because I have never worked in tax assessment or in City Hall. For the purposes of tax collection, I imagine that there are certain things that they absolutely must get right: for example, the dimensions of the parcel, the location of the parcel, the correct name and address of the owner, the current assessment. The build date in this database is like your house paint color: it does not materially affect your assessment.
My initial guess was that 1900 was the default date used by the database designers because it was close enough for taxation purposes. But Jacqueline Hovey offered an even better hypothesis: The Year 1900 Problem.
If there was no fire that destroyed these records, then why didn’t they just skip the 1900 default date and plug in the right dates instead? Here is where I venture even further out on my theoretical limb. I think this is because building records aren’t in the Assessor’s office. They’re in the Permits & Inspections Department. In hard copy, they may not be all that portable. Establishing the build date for every address in Buffalo probably requires a manual look-up. Not the best use of tax department staff for an inessential field in a big database.
Since OARS is not reliable when it comes to build dates, then how do you determine when your Buffalo house was built? Leaving the realm of hypothesis, we now return to the factual world.
The best and often only source is Buffalo Common Council Proceedings, some of which are online. Council Proceedings date back to 1832, when Buffalo was incorporated as a city. Every week, when Council convened to deliberate on the public’s business, they also officially approved the building permits applied for that week. Even in 1832, the City required and issued building permits, though the scope of work requiring a permit has no doubt greatly expanded since then.
The permits were then listed and published in the Proceedings, one volume for each year. The volumes that are not digitized can be found in hard copy in various libraries. The oldest editions are available only on microfilm. Here is what a typical permit listing looks like. Notice that Caroline’s house number on Hudson was not yet assigned.
Since I first published this essay, our friends at the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library compiled an index of building permits from Common Council Proceedings, 1887-1906. It is an 1,800 page PDF in A-Z order by street name.
I’ve also watched the urban legend morph in real time to Well, actually, I heard it was a flood. Fair enough, but the burden of proof is still on you. Search newspapers and Common Council Proceedings and get back to me when you have the date of the flood and a description of the damage.
Because this essay relies heavily on guesswork, I welcome comments and corrections from anyone with first-hand experience working on OARS.
Postscript: A Tedious Essay About Government Record-Keeping Practices
BuffaloResearch.com 