Second in a series on searching for the birthplace of my great, great grandfather Arthur Bull.
Two possible birth locations for my great, great grandfather Arthur Bull — Greene County and Schoharie County, N.Y. — appear on various civil and military documents spanning several decades — a curious phenomenon that I wrote about in last week’s post Schoharie County serendipity.
Naturally, questions spring to mind: Why the fluctuating birthplaces? Did Arthur really not know where he was born? Or is this seeming conundrum actually a promising lead that might help me identify the place of Arthur’s 1834 birth and pinpoint where he spent his early years?
In search of answers, I turned to several historic sources — and found my first clue in the 1860 Gazetteer of the State of New York by J.H. French. The Schoharie County chapter begins:
This county was formed from Albany and Otsego, April 6, 1795. A small part of Greene was annexed in 1836.
This sounded promising. If Arthur’s 1834 birth took place in the portion of Greene County that — two years later — was annexed to Schoharie County, it might explain why these two counties were given interchangeably as his birthplace on various documents over the years.
Next, I looked at a digital version of the New York: Atlas of Historic County Boundaries, which contains a section titled New York: Individual County Chronologies. Scrolling down the list to Greene County, I found the date of the land transfer along with a legislative reference I could follow up on later:
03 Mar 1836 GREENE lost to SCHOHARIE. (N.Y. Laws 1836, 59th sess., ch. 31/p. 33)
So where was this annexed land located? I kept digging, and on the New York: Atlas of Historic County Boundries web page found a digital document with maps of county borderlines and their changes over time.
One Greene County map in this collection clearly shows the land that was ceded to Schoharie County in 1836. Could this be it? Had I found the area where my ancestor Arthur Bull was born?
To be continued.
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