There are currently over 5.5 million names that have been indexed within the GRC Reports for New York. To conduct a search for your Ancestors in the DAR GRC Reports for your NY Ancestors, I suggest the following steps.
Step 1: Go to the DAR website at https://www.dar.org/.
Step 2: At the top, click on the GRS tab to take you to the Genealogical Research System.
Step 3: From the GRS page, click on the GRC tab to conduct a search. Accessing this page from home looks different than if you are searching onsite at the DAR Library as there is more options there (such as browsing the collection).
You can search all states or select a specific state. It is required that you enter in a surname but optional to add a given name.
Step 4: Review your results.
For our example, I selected New York as the state and put in the name of Oliver Grace in the search fields to which I received 27 results.
Oliver Grace was one of the first newspaper publishers in Niagara County in the 1820s. I have also seen him as a clerk for the Court of General Sessions.
The search results show the state abbreviation, the series, volume, and page number. It appears that, in NY, that series number separates the collection by the following:
- Series 1: Cemetery, Church, & Town Records
- Series 2: Bible/Church and Other Records
- Series 3: Local History?
- Series 4: Maps?
Step 5: Find the volume and page number listed in the search results.
To retrieve the transcribed record, you have a couple of options as mentioned in my previous blog: https://jeanettesgenealogy.com/dar-grc-reports-part-1-of-3-background/. If you would like to look to see if the desired volume is available on FamilySearch, continue with the steps below.
Step 6: Conduct an Author search in the FamilySearch Catalog for “Daughters of the American Revolution.”
In the 1970s, FamilySearch microfilmed many of the DAR GRC volumes and, has since, digitized them and made them available within the FamilySearch Catalog.
Step 7: Scroll down the search results to find the Genealogical Records Committee for New York State.
There are two NY GRC Report collections: Bible and Cemetery, Church, and Town Records.
For the NY Bible collection, FamilySearch has Volumes 1-32, 34-87, 89-143.
For the NY Cemetery, Church, and Town Records collection, FamilySearch has 1-66, 68-69, 72-85, 89-99, 101-115, 117-135, 146-171, 178-188, 190-191, 195-202, 204-205, 207-246, 248-250, 252-253, 255-256, 258-267, 269-285, 287, 289-290, 293-320, 322-324, 326-380, 385, 387-388.
You can see from the icon on the right – the one that looks like a document with stars – that FamilySearch is starting to apply full-text AI searching to these volumes:
One of the search results that I would like to pull is: NY: S1: V317: P58.
I believe that Series 1 is the Cemetery, Church, and Town Records collection.
For this example, volume 317 is available on FamilySearch and, as a bonus, it is one of the ones that is full-text searchable. Conducting a search for “Oliver Grace” within the DGS was very easy to do and directly took me to page 58.
The record says that Oliver Grace was born in 1792 and died 12 May 1871 and is buried in Lewiston.
Going to the beginning of the entries for more info, it says that transcribed records were copied from the Niagara County Historian’s Office between 1966-68. Then they list the names and locations of the cemeteries included in the transcription.
A link to the above page on FamilySearch: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSS9-J4SC-G?
A second one of the search results that I would like to pull is: NY: S1: V453: P340.
Volume 453 is not one of the ones that FamilySearch microfilmed and digitized. However, knowing that Oliver Grace is listed somewhere in Deed Records is a good reminder to search for him within that collection which is on FamilySearch.
FamilySearch New York Land Records 1630-1975: https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/2078654.
There are many search returns within the NY Land Records collection for Oliver Grace. At some point in the future, I can then compare them to the GRC Report volume 453 the next time that I am either in Albany (where the physical books are) or in DC on the DAR Library computers.
A third one of the search results that I would like to pull is: NY: S2: V35: P70.
I believe that Series 2 for New York is the Bible Records collection.
Volume 35 is available on FamilySearch. However, at this time, it is not full-text searchable. So I will manually find page 70. This wasn’t all that hard to do as I had used this exact page in the previous blog.
It lists Oliver Grace and his wife, Sarah, as witnesses, parents, and sponsors for baptisms performed at St. Paul’s Church in Lewiston.
That completes my step by step example for searching the DAR Master Index and then, hopefully, finding the record on FamilySearch. If it is not available on FamilySearch, please refer to my previous blog post for other options on how to obtain the records.