Cattaraugus County GenWeb "What's New"

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Apr 25^th, 2021 Judith Quinn has has volunteered to assist us as the Coordinator for the town of Perrysburg. Along with her many contributions of documents, photos and information, she has taken on the task of creating some of the pages for the town.
On another note, the County has released the latest directory of County Officials, a copy of which can be accessed from our home page. We have also updated the officials listed on each town page to the April 1st 2021 directory. There were many changes.
Apr 14^th, 2021We competed the Perrysburg Disctrict 3 School Census notes for 1941-1946. We added images of the original notes as well. Why both text and photos of the same document, text is so that search engines can find the names you search for, and the photo so you can see the original document in case we misread and transcribed it. Thanks again to Judith Quinn for contributing these documents.
Mar 14^th, 2021 Judith Quinn contributed a photo of the students of the Perrysburg Disctrict 3 School 1933-34 with names. Also the obituary of Robert Rohrich of Perrysburg.
Feb 17^th, 2021 Judith Quinn contributed several postcardsof the J. N. Adams Memorial Hospitial in Perrysburg.
Jan 25^th, 2021 Added a 1954 class photo of the sixth grade of school #4, Olean NY. Included in the page are links to a couple obituaries of class members.
Oct 18^th, 2020 Again, more obituaries, also added a list of 1954 Hinsdale Seniors, with links to the obituaries of a few of them. Also noted the passing of Merle Schultz, who with his wife Jean, were invaluable with their contributions to the Allegany Protestant Cemetery.
July 10^th, 2020 Many more obituaries from the town of Olean added thanks to several contributors.
May 18^th, 2020Several more obituaries added to our growing list of recent obituaries. The reasoning behind this effort is because obituaries contain genealogical information and with more and more newspapers going out of business, this will perhaps be one more research source for future generations.
May 18^th, 2020Added some obituaries to the Olean Class of 1959 page. Since we have obituaries scattered all over the web site, I decided it you be appropriate to have a page which would be an index to them. LOL, first I have to find them all, but I have a start. A link to this page can also be found on the home page as "Collected Obituaries"
May 7^th, 2020 This COVID-19 STAY HOME deal has given me a chance to go though some of my files. I found an email that I had been misfiled. I contained a zip file with scans of Class of '58 Salamanca Year Book. First, I want to thank whoever it was that sent it to me, I tried to replied to your email but it bounced. and you left no name. I tried to find out whose book it was, and after reading some of the notes written in it, I think it belonged to Lana Redeye. In an effort to reach out, I did a little digging and found she recently (Aug. 12, 2019) passed. I have no proof, but I would like to believe it was she that sent me the scans. Her name in the Senior Class is also linked to the obit.
I added the four classes, Freshman through Seniors and the links can be found on the Salamanca Page under Schools. I transcribed the names so they would be found by search engines, and included the class pictures except for the seniors, there I just included a listing. I checked Classmates.com and it appears whoever sent the scans to me, sent then entire yearbook to Classmates. There are many more pictures in the yearbook so if you are interested, I encourage you to check it out.
May 2^nd, 2020 Another well known and respected teacher from Hinsdale has passed. Her obituary lists her parents, and also mentions many other people. Transcribed from the Olean Times Herald and added to the Town of Hinsdale Page - Betty Pappas 1930 - 2020.
April 17^th, 2020 There are several commerical web pages that have over the years provided genealogy researchers with valuable resources. Many of these are big well known companies. However, from time to time, smaller companies, some run by a single individual and not well known except withing the genealogy community, come to our attention. What to do with these commercial links. Well we decided to put them all in one place and if you want to look into them, you can. They are not our sponsors, we have no financial connections to them. We simply include them because you have asked us to. — Recently, a new company asked to be included on our commercial links page. KnowYourDNA offers advice and information about DNA testing. They can be now found on our commerical links web page. All links are external web sites andopen in a new window..
April 16^th, 2020 Added a photo and names of the member of the Olean High School band of 1931.
April 15^th, 2020 Completed the Ellicottville High School Yearbook "Ellicon". Lots of photos, names, along with a letter at the end of the book that details where and what some of them were doing 10 years later in 1950.
Mar 12^th, 2020 Completed the Ellicottville High School Yearbook "Ellicon". Lots of photos, names, along with a letter at the end of the book that details where and what some of them were doing 10 years later in 1950.
Mar 1^st, 2020 A new project is underway. We are transcribing the Ellicottville High School 1940 yearbook "Ellicon". So far we have only completed the intro pages and the senior class. Because it is being transcribed in a text format rather than images, individual names will be found by searches. This is an ongoing project. More to come
Feb 21^st, 2020 Fixed Town Menu on Home Page where it took you to the wrong Franklinville page. Improved menus in individual town pages. Added some photos of Pioneers and Early Settlers to the Town of Allegany page. On the top menu, click on "In This Page" - scroll down to the bottom of the menu and click on "Pioneers"
Feb 17^th, 2020 Fixed Town Menu on Home Page. Redesigned menus in individual town pages. Previous format placed buttons too close together.
Jan 10^th, 2020 Rootsweb posted the following message on their web site: "Beginning March 2nd, 2020 the Mailing Lists functionality on RootsWeb will be discontinued. Users will no longer be able to send outgoing emails or accept incoming emails. Additionally, administration tools will no longer be available to list administrators and mailing lists will be put into an archival state."
Jan 3^rd, 2020— Added a 1921 Olean NY newspaper clipping that detail the funerals and ceremonies for three doughboys whose remains were returned to their home town.
Also changed the link to the WWI Diary of Cpl Wilfred Allen on the Military page so that it opens directly to the diary instead of the index of included surnames which is now available from a menu on the Diary page. I Identified some new broken links on the Military Page and disabled them but left the descriptions so if anyone knows of a new URL for those link, let us know. All external links on that page now open in a new window.
Nov 12^th, 2019—Allegany - Added the Allegany Public Library Digital Newspaper Collection.
Oct 2^nd, 2019— Added a link to the Western New York Genealogical Societyon the "Other Helpful Starters" page. Their work focuses on the eight counties of Western New York - Erie, Niagara, Genesee, Wyoming, Orleans, Chautauqua, Cattaraugus and Allegany
Sept 17^th, 2019—Salamanca - Added the names of the 1936 Junior Class (Class of 37). Click on the "Schools" button on the Salamanca page to navigate to the link to the class page.
Sept 4^th, 2019 —Updated contact information on the King Family Chronology, and added a surname researcher to the Town of Randolph page.
May 5^th, 2019 —Updated contact information on the Allegany Protestant Cemetery.
May 5^th, 2019 — Finished updating all the Town, Village, and City Clerks and Historians with information from the April 2019 County Directory. Took this opportunity to more or less standardize to the Town Pages to facilitate future updates and maintenance and to bring them into compliance with current HTML5 standards. While I was at it, I verified all the email contacts that were on those pages by sending each one an email. Many bounced, some never responded. Those that did responde will have a green "ball" after the link and hovering your mouse over the link will give you the verification date.
April 23^rd 2019 — The April 1, 2019 version of the Cattaragus County Directory of Officials has been upload and can be downloaded as a PDF file.
March 24^th 2019 — If your email address appears anywhere on our web site as a method of contacting you as a contributor, or as a researcher of a surname, double check that it is a valid email address. We have started the process of going through each town page, checking that the Town Official contact information is up to date. Also checking links and email addresses of researchers. Many are no longer working. Old "Compuserve" , "Prodigy" and "Adelphia" email address. Verification emails are being sent to each address. Those that don't answer orl bounce will be removed. Email addresses associate with a person named as a contributor that aren't valid will the the email function removed, but their name will remain with the page in recognition of their contribution.
March 17^th 2019 ☘ — Updated Town Clerk contact for the Town of Leon based on 2018 Cattaraugus Directory
March 13^th 2019 — Added seventh grade photos from St. Mary's for 1954 and 1962 to the Town of Olean schools.
March 11^th 2019 — Upgraded the WWI Diary of Cpl Allen to HTML5 added some links. Fixed some bad links and displays.
March 2^nd 2019 —Corrected a bad location for 1894 Olean Schools Four and Five.
February 12^th, 2019 — Fixed broken links to Cattaraugus Republican Newspaper, and Old Postcards
January 12^th, 2019While fixing a minor formatting error on an Olean Schools page I discovered that almost all of the class photos and images were missing as well as a couple of actual web pages. Apparently they have been missing for several months. I was able to restore from an archived backup.
December 23^rd, 2018Added some background history to the Ashford Henrietta Cemetery. Click Additional Notes in the menu
October 18^th, 2018 - Overhauled the Randolph postcard collections for better readability. Deleted reduntant files, fixed broken links, brought HTML up to current standards.
October 17^th, 2018 - Added a postcard and reformated entire Salamanca postcard collection for better readability
July 14^th, 2018 - The Rootsweb Mailing list buttons on the home page are now functional.
June 23rd, 2018 - Added a newspaper wedding clipping for the Abell-Woodard marriage. Link to it is found in the Abel entry in the Allegany Protestant Cemtery.
June 5th, 2018 - Found errors in Leon Hollow Cemetery that was resulting in links not being found. Corrected same.
June 4th, 2018 - Dayton's Cottage Cemetery; Myrna Moss added information for several recent burials.
May 21st, 2018 - Corrected information for the Cottage Cemetery in South Dayton. Thanks Elizabeth Love for the corrections. While I was at it, reformatted the Cottage Cemetery pages to load faster and comply with current standars.
May 7th, 2018 - Updated the list of Town And City Historians, removed several email addresses that were bouncing. If you encounter a link that doesn't work, or an email address that bounces, please let ust know.
April 28, 2018 - Many other counties have moved from Ancestry/Rootsweb. We updated our page with links to our Neighboring Counties in both NY and PA. Updated Town Officials on the Hinsdale page. Other minor changes throughout the site, mostly reformatting.
March 7, 2018 - Ancestry/Rootsweb UPDATE - The Cattaraugus Mailing list has been activated by Rootsweb. As far as this web site is concerned, I think the move to this server is going to be permanent. Much easier to maintain, and we don't have to contend with those Ancestry banner ads that screwed up the formatting of pages. Changes to an email address forced me to get into the 1855 NYS Census index pages. Those pages hadn't been modified since they were uploaded in June of 2000. Much of the underlying HTML code was obsolete and the readability, while as good for that time period, left a lot to be desired. So, the entire 1855 NYS Index was reformatted into the current HTML standards, and made much more readable as well as maintainable. This was just a reformatting, no changes were made to the data. The list of Cattaraugus County Officials (selected pages) has been updated, it was revised in January of this year.
March 1, 2018 - I have been on a mission to find and fix broken links and the work continues. Also, if you have your email address on our site as a researcher please check to see if it is up to date. Found many "compuserve", "prodigy", "adelphia". "buffnet" and other defunct email addresses.
With regard to the Ancestry/Rootsweb outage, not much has changed since Dec 22, 2017. There last statement (January) stated that they were doing software upgrades and it would be months before they were back on line. That was what moved me to relocate our website to a private server. The NY State Coordinator for GenWeb has changed the links on the NYGenWeb site to point to archived versions of many sites, so some information is still available for other counties.
February 11, 2018 - Fixed display errors and reformatted the Early Settlers of Randolph to html5 standards.
January 25, 2018 - Fixed display errors and reformatted the 1800 Wards in Western NY to html5 standards.
January 22, 2018 - Verified links and reformatted the Pioneer Links page. Added new information in the Perrigo Family Page, reformatted to html5 standards.
January 15, 2018 - Repaired links in town of Randolph Unknown Photos, reformatted to html5 standards.
January 11, 2018 - American Indian Links Page - fixed bad link to Horseshoe Cemetery (pointed to an outdated page) added link to National Archives Native Americans page, added Seneca Clerk info, reformated all to html5 standards.
January 6, 2018 - The Cattaraugus County GenWeb site is up and running, I think everything successfully uploaded. I fixed links, and did some general housecleaning and I think we are pretty well set. If you spot anything that doesn't work, drop me a line.
Dec 23, 2017 - Today, Ancestry.com took down all of RootsWeb. The Reason given was a security issue and they indicated that it would be a few weeks before they put RootsWeb back on line. Tony Blackham, Chief Information Security Officer at Ancestry, stated in his blog "We are doing a deep analysis of RootsWeb, its design and how we might be able to help the community enhance the site and its services.". Because of the uncertainty of the situation, down time and other issues I have elected to move the Cattaraugus Web Site to a new domain, nycattar.org at least temporarily, possibly permanently. There are pros and cons to the new domain. Con: First access seems to take longer than I am used to, but it is fast after that. Pro: Gone are those annoying banners at the top of every page. Other things work better, links are easier to check.

The NYGenWeb site has been off Roots Web for some time, as are many of the other counties in New York. I guess what I am saying is I will need a compelling reason to go back to RootsWeb. USGenWeb and NYGenWeb are on their own servers and still up and running.
Dec 20, 2017 - Fixed broken links and reformated several pages in the newspaper section to make them easier to read and navigate.
Dec 7, 2017 - Added Cattaraugus County Directory to the County Resources, updated Town of Allegany Page and verified links.
June 10, 2017 - Identified broken links on the Military Page. Added a link to photos of WNY Vietnam KIAs.
May 13, 2017 - Many thanks to Danny Eastman who email us and set a PDF scan of the 1937 Program for the Ellicottville Centennial. His father, Leland Eastman had saved the original in his scrapbook. It took a while, but I managed to get it transcribed so that if you search and family name on our site and it is contained in the Centennial Program, it will come up on your search. I tried my best to keep the formatting and fonts as much like the original as possible. It's amazing how fastidious they were in 1937 to punctuation. A lost art today I fear. Here is a link to the Centennial Program. There is also a link to it from the Ellicottville Town page.
April 26, 2017 - The The Cattaraugus Republican is complete, All 16 pages (each page 1/2 of the actual newspaper page) have been uploaded, Lots of names, places and stories. Hope you find one of your ancestors "in the news." Link: Cattaraugus Republican Sept 20 1901 (note: off site however, with links back to here)
April 2, 2107 - Cattaraugus Republican - Two pages added today, The second half of page 3 (3b) and the first half of page 4 (4a) are on line. Page 4 contains many surnames"personals" column.
March 30, 2017 - Cattaraugus Republican - Page two (2b) is complete. First three columns of page three (3a) are online. Like the rest of the pages, these pages have numerous surnames of people living in Cattaraugus County. However, a lot of the paper was devoted to the assassination of President McKinley. While it doesn't add much genealogical value it does provide some interesting reading and insight into the thoughts of the people in 1901. One interesting thing I found was that there was suspicion the bullet had been poisoned to assure his death, however a few days after the publication of this newspaper toxicology disproved that theory. There also some interesting advertisements which I have included.
March 27, 2017 - Cattaraugus Republican - Third page (actually, page 2a) has been added. Improved navigation links menu has been added to all pages.
March 21, 2017 - Added another page, two pages on line each containing three of the six columns that comprise one page. Published Sept 20 1901 it contains many surnames and interesting, many references to McKinley's assassination and the funeral train.
March 20, 2017 - Starting a transcription project. A 1901 newspaper, The Cattaraugus Republican is being transcribed. It is a work in progress and very time consuming and it is far from complete (only one page so far). However as pages are transcribed we will add them to the site.
February 22, 2017 back in the saddle after hip surgury. Updated DOD for Stanly Bennett in the Allegany Cemetery. Added 2016 burials to Rutledge Cemetery along with additional information about those individuals, such as survivors, spouses, places of birth, etc.. This all courtesy of Claudia Patterson.
April 1st 2016 - Thanks to emails from the daughters of the late Becky (Cygan) Cameron, we were able to correct the spelling of her name in the School 10 Grade 6 photo, and identify her in the School 1 grade 2 photo.
April 3rd 2016 - Reformatted the East Randolph (Maple Hill) cemetery from "frames" to "page" based HTML to eliminate the display problems resulting from the Ancestry.com heaqers.
February 4th 2016 - Corrected an entry on the Thomas Corners Cemetery (also known as Bond Cemetery) that was brought to my attention by researcher Pamela Johnson.
January 2016 - Spend much of the month verifying and correcting external web site and email links. Reformatted many pages.
December 12th, 2015 -1850 Census pages for the Town of Lyndon: Some of these pages were not reachable from the index. Added navigation to the bottom of each page so now it is possible to browse page-to-page without going back to the Index page. Reformated the pages to make them more readable, and to conform to modern HTML standards. [ 1850 Lyndon Index ]. The "Historic Path of Cattaraugus County" web site requested that we link to them. It is a very well done and interesting site. A link was added on the Towns and County History page.
December 3rd, 2015 - Added much information and reformatted the Carnahan Family Cemetery (Elko). Also added navigation to the page and added it to the list of Cemeteries in Coldspring.
November 30th, 2015 - Completed link checking on the Town of Leon. Added four cemetery links to the page.
November 17th, 2015 - Continuing to check links on pages, working on town pages in alphabetical order, just finished Hinsdale. Some pages had updates to names of Historians, and some additional content. Added the Obituary of Lila Cooper, past historian and well known teacher in Hinsdale.
October 7th, 2015: The 1879 History of Cattaraugus book is now complete. Thanks to the transcription and proof reading efforts of my wife, Jacqueline, the final piece is in place, the town of OTTO. Hope you find an ancestor or two there.
September 24th, 2015: 1879 History of East Otto has been transcribed!!! I finally located a copy of Evert's 1879 History of Cattaraugus County. It has bothered me for some time the the chapters on East Otto and Otto were missing from this web site. I undertook to transcribe the chapter on East Otto first. (Note to self, don't try and proof read a subject you find interesting). After transcribing the chapter I noticed that there were many broken links and other problems with the current representation on the site so decided to clean up the entire sub-section. It took a couple of weeks but it is now there for your pleasure and it now contains East Otto. Additionally work continues on fixing broken links in older "pre-ancestry.com" web pages. Don't know how soon I will get to the Otto page, but it is on the agenda.
August 31st, 2015: There were two sites that do not reside on the Rootsweb site because the Ancestry "banner" interferes with their display frames. The search engine was not finding them because they were off site. That has been corrected which added 94 pages of information to the search engine.
August 27^th, 2015: Corrected Town Historian on for the town of Ashford. Verified researchers email address. Updated the link to ISTG on the "other helpful starters" page, removed broken link to "JustGeneology".
August 26^th, 2015: Fixed several old links so they would be picked up by the search engine. Fixed broken links on the Cemetery page, corrected and reformated Franklinvill Death Records page to improve readability. Search Engine is averaging about 420 searches a month since it was installed.
August 4th, 2015 - Spent the last several days fixing invalid (brocken) links, reformatting old pages to improve readability in several pages including Little Valley, Portville, Lime Lake, Wolf Run, Ashford, Coldspring, Dayton, Early Pioneers, and Otto/East Otto.
Fourth of July 2015 Fixed several broken links which were preventing access to some pages. Improved format and navigation on all the pages in the Town of Connewango.
06/24/2015 - Our new search engine gives me a report of all "off site" and broken links. Many of the links which it thinks are off site and does not index are sites that use the old rootsweb.com url. I have been in the process of going through the site and correcting those old links. While they do actually work (ancestry.com redirects them) the search engine doesn't index them and they wouldn't be included in any searches of the site. There are a LOT of them that were coded that way prior to 2004 when we went to "relative" addresses. So...while it may not seem like much is going on, I am busy working in the background getting more of the pages included when you do a site search.
06/03/2015 - Corrected Beardslee and Ford entries on the Maple Cemetery in Mansfield.
05/30/2015 - Added two new class photos to the Olean page, Second Grade in School 1 (1950), and Sixth Grade at School 10 (1954). I also had to remove the link to some Olean postcard images, the link is broken and just took you to Blumenthals web hosting. Anyone know where that link moved?
05/21/2015 - Fixed link to LDS search in 1892 state census pages.
05/20/2015 - Added four more graves to the Sunset Hill cemetery in Ellicottville from information provided by Charlotte Watkins.
05/18/2015 - Replaced the broken AOL link to the 154th Hardtack Regiment Web Page(Civil War) with the updated link . Added a link to CAMP on the home page.
05/17/2015 - With the reports the new search engine provides, we found that at least 119 pages were excluded from search engine. These older pages had their links hard coded to the old RootsWeb address before Ancestry.com took over. The search engine rejected them as "off site". Spend the weekend editing those links to "relative" links which now are included in the search. It was a real PIA job, but it needed to be done. Many of the pages were census indexes and other documents with LOTS of names. If a previous search yielded no results, I suggest you try it now, it just might find a result that was previously hidden from the search engine.
05/15/2015 - Fellow researcher, Diana Huber, found a problem with our listing of the Allegany Protestant cemetery. It seems that the listing for the names beginning with "G" were only about half there. After a little research, I was able to contact one of the original trasnscribers, Margaret Parker, and she was able to send me copies of the original documents. My wife, Jackie, transcribed them and I added them to the web page. Thanks everyone for your help.
05/14/2015 -FINALLY - Installed FreeFind Search engine to replace the defunct PICO search we had used for years. Its web crawler scanned though our site and indexed 906 pages. Let me know of any problems or what you think of it. Right now we have the "free" version which includes some advertisements, however, if this turns out to be well accepted I may cough up the money for the commercial version.
04/28/2015 Fixed broken link to the Franktown Cemetery in Ashford reported by John Pfeffer, Thanks.
04/24/15 - Added information about the Studley family to the Ashford Town page under Family Lore. Updated the Bates and Brain(e) family information in the Ashford Hollow cemetery Made corrections to Elizabeth M. Irish in the Mount Hope cemetery in Ashford. Updated information on Frances Brown in Allegany Protestant Cemetery. Also updated was the address for the NY office of the National Archives.on the Census and Vital Record Page.
04/23/2015 Updated Town Historian contact information for Great Valley.
04/22/2015 Added a link to the New York Heritage's collection of Olean's Sand Pumping Magazines on the Town of Olean Page.
04/04/2015 - Back in 2012, Nathan Towne contributed an index to the Ward and Hinckley Cash Book/Ledger for the hamlet of Versailles in the town of Perrysburg. It was uploaded to the web site but unfortunately, there were no links to it. I can now be found on the Town of Perrysburg page.
04/03/2015 - PICO no longer supports their search engine. We are currently evaluating several other free search engines.
04/02/2015 - After a couple of years recovering from four surgeries I am now back in the saddle and reviewing the entire web site and emails that came in while I was unable to give them the attention they deserved. I will try my best to get this site current again. Thanks for your patience.