Records of the Holland Land Company

A previous article discussed the role of the Holland Land Company in the settlement of western New York State. This consortium of Dutch bankers in Amsterdam had purchased 3.3 million acres west of the Genesee River in 1792.  When the company ceased operations in America in 1859, its records were transferred to the offices of Van Eeghen, one of the original members of the company.  Each volume or folder was given an inventory item number.  In 1964 the records were transferred to the Municipal Archives in Amsterdam.  The entire collection was microfilmed in 1984.[1]   This collection constitutes a local history of the area written by the participants – settlers, local land agents, bankers, and lawyers.  In this article we explore information contained in this archive, access to the microfilms, and how to use the records.

The Holland Land Company was involved in many enterprises in America.  Most of the 202 microfilm reels are filled with details of the stuff of everyday lives, but as they are not indexed, they are of little use to genealogists.  The bulk of the records are made up of correspondence between the general agent in Philadelphia and the directors in Amsterdam, annual reports from local agents to the general agent, surveyors’ reports, legal papers, maps, etc.  Records may be written in Dutch, French, or English. 

When local agents sold land, the location of the land was specified relative to the grid of townships and ranges laid down by the original Ellicott survey described in the preceding article.  A range is a strip of land six miles wide running north-south.  Ranges are numbered from one at the eastern border and run to the western border, reaching as high as fifteen in the southern part of the state.  Ranges are subdivided into six-mile squares termed townships.  Townships are numbered one at the Pennsylvania border and go north, reaching as high as sixteen along Lake Ontario.  Each square is identified by a township and range number.[2] In reality, many of the townships were not six miles square.  Surveyors had to work around the several Indian reservations not in the Holland Land Purchase as well as waterways and other natural features.

The microfilmed collection of the company’s records is available at the Reed Library at SUNY Fredonia, the New York State Library in Albany, and at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. The microfilm reels are available through interlibrary loan and local Family History Centers.  The Holland Land Company resource page gives further details and a bibliography.

Although there is no overall index to the collection, bound volumes often have some summary of the contents either at the beginning or the end. The most useful items for a family historian are the land tables. The land tables take up only three full reels and two partial reels out of a total of 202 reels. They allow a researcher to connect a name with a location and a date.  The general agent of the company compiled this information from annual reports of local agents.  Each agent was required to send a list of all land transactions to the general agent.  Each entry names the person, the location, the date, and the details of the transaction.  Karen Livsey extracted these microfilmed records [3] for her two-volume work titled Western New York Land Transactions.

The following example shows how to use this finding aid.  In outline, one looks for a name in the index of the book, locates the appropriate extracts in the body of the book, uses the first table appended to this article to determine which microfilm reel contains the transaction information, and uses the second appended table to “translate” the township/range designation to a present-day county/town location.

Nehemiah Sayer is the first name in Volume I, so I chose that for our example.  In the index to Volume I the name occurs five times, each time at the same location.  The five corresponding extracts are as follows.

Column “STR” lists section, township, and range, which specifies the location.  Column “D” indicates the type of transaction.  In this case, “o” means original contract issued, and “s” indicates subsequent transactions.  The column “Ref-page” lists the inventory item number of the land table folder or volume and the page number within the volume.  From this table of extracted entries we already know that Nehemiah Sayer originally contracted for lot 2 in section 6 of township 5, range 1 on June 21, 1803. The details of this transaction are to be found on page 16 of item #484. We do not know from this entry when he actually occupied the site.  However, he had additional dealings with the local agent concerning this lot on September 21, 1804, June 26, 1806, February 1, 1813, and May 4, 1813.  It is likely that these transactions involved additional payments.  Deeds to the land were not issued until final payment was made.

From Table I below we find that item #484 is on reel 109 (FHL film number 1,414,983) and items 490 and 491 are both on reel 110 (FHL film number 1,414,984).  From Table II we find that township 5, range 1 is in the town of Caneadea in Allegany County.  This gives a fairly precise location to begin searching tax lists, church records, census records, and other sources.  The table also indicates that the first contract in T5R1 was written in 1803, making Nehemiah Sayer one of the earliest settlers in the region.  Allegany County was created in 1806 from Genesee County.  We would therefore look for the Nehemiah Sayer household in Genesee County in the 1800 federal census and in Allegany County in the 1810 census.

Table I. Relationship between inventory number and reel number and FHL film number

[3] Western New York Land Transactions; Karen E. Livsey; Genealogical Publishing Co, Vol. I, 1804-1824, 1991; Vol. II, 1825-1835, 1996.