New York State Museum Colonial Albany Social History Project Files

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The Colonial Albany Project (or Colonial Albany Social History Project) was founded by Stefan Bielinksi in 1980 and was sponsored by the New York State Museum to study the lives of 16,000 ordinary people who resided in Albany from the seventeenth century until the early nineteenth century. The project's purpose was to reconstruct "a people-centered portrait of life as it existed in the city of Albany," and "to illuminate and focus the life story of early Albany through the prism of the lives of each early Albany person." It was designed to promote "human understanding by interpreting the history of the people of a broadly constituted and dynamic community that was the center of a large and emerging region over a two-hundred-year-period." Bielinski served as the Colonial Albany Social History Project's director from the time of its inception.

This series consists of reference material documenting resources for research on Colonial Albany. There are no original documents included among these materials. The series was created in support of various projects and publications with which Stefan Bielinkski of the New York State Museum was involved, one of which became a website entitled, "The People of Colonial Albany Live Here."

The series includes extensive files on a wide variety of subjects and relevant reference materials: cemeteries, bibles, obituaries, church records and histories, military pensions, reading files, book excerpts and theses, real property, courts and government organizations, wills and probate material, business correspondence, city records, family histories, and biographical data on specific families and population groups such as African-Americans.

Folder list.

This series was transferred under RDA 22868.

There are no restrictions regarding access to or use of the material.