About

The Minutes Project is a restricted review edition for structured research into the Dutch-period records of New Amsterdam. It presents a searchable, re-edited version of the published Minutes of the Court of Burgomasters and Schepens. The published source was edited by E.B. O'Callaghan and Berthold Fernow and issued in seven volumes in 1897. The court was founded in 1653, but the published volumes include earlier ordinances and records. This review edition currently covers the Dutch period, from 1647 through the English takeover in 1664.

The Minutes are not a narrative history. They are working civic and court records. Clerks recorded debts, lawsuits, ordinances, elections, licenses, taxes, labor disputes, marriages, deaths, insults, inheritances, defense measures, trade disputes, and other events of daily life in New Amsterdam. The legal system wasn't restricted only to white men: New Amsterdam was a melting pot with multiple ethnicities and nationalities. Women owned businesses, traded, and stood up for themselves in court, suing and being sued. The indentured and enslaved also had certain rights and could petition for their freedom. On occasion women acted as attorneys on behalf of others, something that wouldn't happen under English law for several centuries. Freedom of conscience started here, when the Dutch West India Company upheld the rights of Jews and Quakers to live, and worship as they pleased, one of the foundational ideas of the U.S. Constitution.

Tag matrix

This edited edition of the Court Minutes employs a tag matrix of names, places, ships, dates, roles, and keywords. These unique tokens for people, places, ships and dates facilitate searching and retrieving linked items that would otherwise be hard to find. The Minutes were written with a quill pen by clerks at a time when there was no standardized spelling, no printing press, and as many as 18 different languages were being spoken. The clerks wrote down what they heard. Names and spellings vary widely; full-text search with wildcards would be an exercise in futility when confronted with Dutch patronymics allied with wildly creative spelling variations. Without tagging or prior knowledge it would be impossible to connect Heer Oloff to Oloff Stevensen van Cortlandt, a key figure in 17th century New Amsterdam, or to decode that Johannes Gillissen Verbrugge is the same person as Jan Gillesen (a nickname).

Home page

After login, the home page allows searching by tagged names, places, ships, and court dates as well as cards. which provide curated entry points to the Minutes. The cards serve as a jumping off point, a portal into the turbulent daily lives of the inhabitants, highlighting cases of interest while inviting further exploration.

Cards

Cards are displayed beneath the search boxes. They provide curated entry points to selected Minute transcripts. Clicking the link opens the transcripts associated with that card. Card editorial text also provides additional source links and citations related to the card topic. Sources and references are provided to related topics and sources external to the Minutes.

Search boxes

Click or start typing in one of the Name, Place, Ship, or Court date text boxes to see the tag list for that entity.

Search boxes remain active when in the Results or Transcript pages, and you can copy and paste from anywhere into one of the search boxes to initiate a fresh search.

When a name is selected, the site may display a list of tagged offices or occupations in a popup. These tags indicate that the person is mentioned somewhere in the Minutes text in that role or capacity. Some roles are official, others occupational, indicating that the person has been mentioned at least once somewhere in the Minutes in that capacity.

Click the Submit button to load the Results page, which lists the court dates for that item.

Results page

The Results page groups the results by type:

admin, which include ordinances, elections, civic matters and petitions, or

litigation, non-capital court cases.

Each item also includes a comma-delimited list of keywords as a selection aid.

Click the date to load the selected transcript.

Transcripts

The transcript page displays the court date, volume, and page number of the source document. Presiding officers are shown when available.

Transcripts have been edited for readability; honorifics, abbreviations and noise words have been removed. Common spellings have been standardized. Nicknames have been expanded to full names with patronymics to support the tax matrix that allows for identification and linking across the corpus.

Beneath the transcript the View Archive button opens the Internet Archive in another window.

Viewing the Archive

When opening the Internet Archive scan, additional searching may be required. The scan will not align exactly with the retrieved transcript. Minute items have been parsed and reorganized in the Minutes whereas in the original scanned image the item paragraphs appear in the order in which they were written. Minute items are organized by date in both the edited Minutes and the Internet Archive scan.

Editorial method

The Minutes transcripts have not been edited to remove terminology that modern readers may find offensive. The goal is to preserve the historical record as much as possible while improving discovery and understanding. They said what they said; no effort has been made to sanitize the content.

The Secretary and clerks wrote with quill pens, using shorthand and expressions that can be difficult to interpret in context several centuries later. Corrections, tagging errors, spelling issues, and cleanup items will continue to be found during a never-ending review process, which the tagged matrix system makes possible. New, corrected versions of the Minutes corpus can be recompiled and deployed in minutes. The editorial content in the Cards is generated separately, so new cards and related content can be added without affecting the core Minute items.

The tagged entity structure is the result of manual research, editorial judgment, and technical design. The tags do more than improve search. They create linkable evidence to help trace relationships among people, events, places, vessels, offices, and records.

Original project work

The historical source materials are public-domain or out-of-copyright materials. No claim is made to the underlying public-domain records or to historical facts.

Original project work includes the project-specific edited presentation, tag matrix, entity annotations, entity disambiguation decisions, source mappings, database compilation, content organization, UI text, documentation, and editorial content.

Sources and acknowledgments

This project is grounded in the published New Amsterdam records and in the work of scholars, editors, translators, archivists, and institutions that have made New Netherland history more accessible. The Minutes Project would not have been possible without their pioneering research.

I am especially grateful to Toya Dubin and Esme Berg of the New Amsterdam History Center, newamsterdamhistorycenter.org, and am proud to be a NAHC contributor.

References:

E.B. O'Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, editors of the published Minutes

Russell Shorto, Island at the Center of the World and Taking Manhattan, nyhistory.org

Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland

Charles Gehring, The New Netherland Research Center

Firth Haring Fabend, New Netherland in a Nutshell

Oliver A. Rink, Holland on the Hudson

Marc B. Fried, The Early History of Kingston & Ulster County, N.Y.

Michelle Nevius, James Nevius, Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Yvette Boertje, Defragged History, defraggedhistory.com/new-amsterdam

Privacy and access notice

This site requires login for access to search results and transcript pages. Accounts are created by invitation. Public registration is not available.

The site may record basic access and security events, including login time, failed login attempts, and page access, as needed for security, troubleshooting, and administration.

User account information is not sold.