Accuracy of the Yearbooks of the Holland Society of New York.

Question

How accurate are the many Yearbook of the Holland Society of New York that contain record transcriptions? Specifically the 3 Bergen books (1913, 1914 and 1915). Or are there copies of the original RDC records that have been digitized available someplace online?

Answer 1

There are people with various opinions on the subject, but I don't get bogged down into trying to rank or prioritize sources. All of them have errors from time to time, so no matter what the reputation for a particular source is, it can be wrong.

If I want to improve my confidence that something is more likely correct, I would focus on multiple sources to cross-reference information to verify the data.

Answer 2

Do you have questions or concerns about particular records or about the records (or lack of records) for a particular person or family?

If the actual original records still exist (some New Netherland records were lost after being transcribed), they are not digitized and available online. Regardless of that, I am not aware of doubts about the accuracy of the Bergen records transcriptions. In general, the researchers who did the transcriptions for the Holland Society were dedicated to the task of reading and transcribing the records that were created by Dutch clerics in 17th-century Dutch handwriting. (It's hard to imagine someone like me doing a better job than they did, with their accumulated experience poring over records, and presumably with a good bit of familiarity with the families of early Bergen.) The introduction to the first book of Bergen records (see https://archive.org/details/yearbookofholla1913holl/page/n7/mode/2up and following pages) testifies to their meticulous attention to detail.

Concerns have been reported about the quality of the transcriptions (notably the recording of name spellings) of Flatbush church records in the Holland Society Year Book for 1898, but those concerns do not extend to the Year Books of 1913, 1914, and 1915, which contain Bergen records.

I would not rely on the index versions of Holland Society records for Bergen that may be found on FamilySearch -- because the FamilySearch versions often omit genealogically significant details found the more complete church record transcriptions in the year books. The Holland Society Year Books for Bergen are online for free, so there is no reason not to access them.

Members with experience working with the Holland Society or working in New Jersey archives may be able to tell you more.

Comments

Thank you for the reply. I have been using the Internet Archive versions of the 3 Bergen Books, and before that the print versions at my local library. I assumed they were accurate as claimed in the introduction. I really just wanted to gauge what everyone thought of the records. The early Dutch settlers are tough due to the lack of original records and having to rely on transcriptions. Included in that list would be works such as: Documents Relating to the Colonial History of New Jersey, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York, Ecclesiastical Records State of New York and many other collections and works from around the same time.

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Another potential issue with the various "Documents related to the colonial history..." books (and similar) is translation quality. The original documents were in the Dutch language, so the English-language versions are translations. It's entirely possible for different translators to disagree on the interpretation of a text. There has been some effort in recent years to translate additional New Netherland documents or provide new translations of selected documents that were translated in the 19th century. Also, some original documents have been digitized and are now available online. See https://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org/research/online-publications for information about some of these materials.