Sign up for Genealogy Pointers »

The Holland Land Company was a stock corporation formed by six Dutch banking houses for the purpose of buying land in New York. By the year 1797 the Company had purchased some 3.3 million acres of land in western New York, west of the Genesee River. Known as the Holland Land Purchase (or the Genessee Purchase), all this land was sold off by 1839. The records of the Holland Land Company are in Amsterdam; however, a microfilm copy is available and it represents the basis upon which publication was constructed.

At the heart of the microfilm are the Holland Company "Land Tables," showing year by year which lands had been sold, to whom, and on what terms.This present work is an index to the the Land Tables from their inception in 1804 until the year 1824. Also covered are the land transactions in Morris' Reserve and a tract of land known as the 40,000-Acre Tract, both east of the Purchase.

Touching on some 40,000 individual land transactions, the extracts given here provide the purchaser's name, the location of the purchase, the date of the transaction, the type of transaction, and a citation to the original source and microfilm. Given the extent of the Purchase (encompassing lands stretching from Genesee County west to the counties of Erie, Chautauqua, and Cattaraugus, and covering such towns as Buffalo and Batavia), and given further the general lack of hard genealogical data on the early settlers of this region of New York, this work now ranks as the premier genealogical sourcebook for western New York.