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August 2017 Comments, News & Site Updates – New Research: We do not have a real understanding of the early family. The flood of new information has enabled us to take a new look at the first four or five generations in preparing the ground work for the 1850 study. VanAlstyne has some problems. DNA studies rely on the soundness of the underlying supporting genealogies. We hope to support these studies with an accurate picture of the earliest generations. What we are trying to accomplish with the new 1850 based analysis is to connect all the Heads in that census year to the immigrant ancestor. After 1850 documentation multiplies by ten or 100 fold and genealogies are quite easy to construct. The brick walls start appearing with the heads in the 1850 census. Bryan has outdone himself and published two new studies that in my opinion are some of the most original work since VanAlstyne. The first 32 page effort is titled Many Benjamin Knickerbockers that dissects 12 different Benjamins and in doing so identifies holes in Van Alstyne and our current thinking. He corrects and rearranges some of the confusion created by the repetitive Dutch naming practices. Link The second is a 21 page study titled Hugh Knickerbocker and Rachel Schram that examines five different Hugh Knickerbockers. Bryan again fills in a missing family line and contributes to the 1850 study. Link Bryan has gone off and has split his original Migration Study into two parts. His latest draft adds huge detail to the Van Alstyne history and suggests other future study possibilities. He promises to make them available within the next month or so. I’ve finished my monolog titled The Father of Solomon Knickerbocker (1812-92) Identified which chronicles my discovering a Plymouth, CT document at Salisbury that finally knocked down my Knick brick wall. The message here is don’t give up. More documents are becoming available every day. This monolog is an experiment to have a foundation and outline for this type of report. Feedback is appreciated so I can distribute single family information in the most useful way. Link I’ll be adding many documents, databases and Knotable Knicks. The biggest hurdle is creating an index for effectively finding the information. Bryan just sent me an English translation of Harme Jansen’s will that I’ll be adding. Everyone knows the power of collaborative electronic publishing. I solicit any information, data or investigative writing for our web site. You will see a revision code on our new studies. If you have corrections or additional input contact us. Put these revision controls to work. Question of the month - I inserted a Table of Authorities in my Solomon monolog consisting of links to every data source referenced. I really prefer this to written source notes with no access to the original records. That is So 1950ish. The question is should we use Family Search or Ancestry for the census links? Bryan made the following observations a few months ago: “I am impressed with recent improvements in Familysearch. FS has always had decent download capability for members, but it is even better now than I remember. FS has found far more "Knickerbockers" than Ancestry. Ancestry is disappointing. It is too hard to export data from Ancestry. It took twice as long to create the same sort of spreadsheet. I am sure this is intentional. As a for-profit business, Ancestry wants users to put data in, not to take data out.” Ancestry requires a paid subscription for access. That said I prefer the summary sheet in the Ancestry records. Ancestry welcomes corrections and additions to the census databases while FS does not. I think I will provide census links to both services in my future Table of Authorities for completeness. Neither service is perfect.
· Many Benjamin Knickerbockers Link · Hugh Knickerbocker and Rachel Schram Link · The Father of Solomon Knickerbocker (1812-92) Identified Link
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