By Norman Carlson, Chautauqua County Historian
The Chautauqua County government holds an enormous quantity of records of interest to genealogical researchers. Genealogical researchers can approach these from a very large number of directions. The best available listings or inventories are the ones done in 1938 at www.newyorkfamilyhistory.org and a comparable survey done in 1998 (A Guide to the Archival Records of the Chautauqua County Clerk 1998). The 1938 inventory is longer and more extensive, but many of the locations are no longer valid. The County Historian has a modest but very helpful number of records in his office, but by far most of the records are under the care of the County Clerk and it is these, or some of these, which are listed in the inventories.
Many beginning genealogists do not realize that a vast number of Chautauqua County Clerk records, up to 1984, are available free and available on a home computer on Familysearch digitized from microfilm, some indexed but some not. Documents not indexed, as well as those that are indexed, can be viewed as images. Familysearch is set up to search for names, not so much to search for documents. They can be hard to find. Land records, for example can be found at www.familysearch.org
My job includes helping genealogical researchers do research in Chautauqua County records. That includes primarily records created by county government and held here at the courthouse. However, I also try to help researchers with any form of local research including records available on-line and in print anywhere in the county. The two on-line behemoths of genealogical records and research for Chautauqua County, as for most of the world, are Familysearch and Ancestry. Familysearch is free and universally available and it is the one that holds county records. However. Every serious researcher is also going to need material found on Ancestry. Ancestry is a subscription service. It requires your credit card number and it takes the subscription money directly from your bank account. You can sign up for a 14 day free trial, but you will have to give your credit card number and overtly cancel before the trial runs out if you want to avoid an automatic paid six month follow up subscription followed by additional automatic subscriptions and withdrawals. It is possible to use part of Ancestry’s services and access part of their data holdings with a permanent free account but it is very difficult to find the screen where you create an account and very difficult to avoid slipping into the 14 day free trial for the full or regular paid Ancestry. Use this site: support.ancestry.com. Also see this page.
Residents of New York State have another option for free use of Ancestry which is useful for doing research in New York records. This video www.archives.nysed.gov tells you how to establish a free Ancestry New York account.
Another much better known means of free use of Ancestry is through Ancestry Library Edition. This is available for use only in participating libraries, of which there are many in the county. It does not allow you to build your personal family tree on the service but does provide most of the same data sources and search abilities as a regular paid Ancestry account.
