New York City Jury Census 1816

My fourth great grandfather, Garrett Smith Duryea (1777-1834), was a cartman and grocer in New York City. (The name is spelled with variations throughout records.)

In between the federal decennial census, individual locales ran their own enumerations of inhabitants.

In 1816, New York City created a Jury Census- people who were possibly qualified to serve on a jury.

A search tool for this collection is at Ancestry while images are on the website of the New York City Department of Records and Information Services. 

The address of a person in the jury census is provided by the index at Ancestry. To find this entry in the images, you need to look page by page, or find the possible ward by using a map from this time. Garrit S Duryee was living at 168 Maiden Lane, according to the index. On a map from 1817, Maiden Lane was in Ward 2. (Some streets lie in more than one ward.)

Map of New York City 1817
The New York Public Library Digital Collections

This jury census is different from the federal census in that it provides the exact age of the subject. Garrit was 39 years old in 1816, which matches a year of birth of 1777. His occupation was grocer and he had no exemptions from jury service.

The second page provides details about the household. He was a freeholder of more than 100 pounds (not dollars). This could have been 134 Delancey Street, which he purchased in 1807. Four males and three females lived in this household in 1816. The males were probably Garrett and his three sons, Rulief, John, and Stephen. One of the females was likely my fourth great grandmother, Ann Cornell (1784-1871). The other females could have been servants, siblings, mothers, or daughters who died young and are not named in any records discovered yet.

New York City city directory
Images online at The New York Public Library Digital Collections

The 1816 New York City city directory provides Garrett's address as 168 Fly-market. His address changed often.

For comparison, in 1810 Garret Deryea lived in the tenth ward, probably on Broome or Grand, based on the city directories for this time period. He was the male between the ages of 26 and 44. The two young males were probably his sons John and Rulief. One of the females was probably his first wife, Charity Horton.

In the 1820 census, the household had grown.

Rulief was about 16 years old and the oldest living child. Next were John, Stephen, Garrett Junior, and Jacob. Because the rest of the household is not named, we cannot know if these were the children represented by these counts.

The rest of the household was probably a mixture of other relatives. Some of the young males might be undiscoverable children who died young.

Or the numbers might be wrong.

Note: this is not the same Garret Duryea (1750-1825) who lived in Orange County, New York.

Ancestry DNA Circle for the Wrong Ancestor

Finally I am placed in an Ancestry.com DNA Circle.

The common ancestor surprised me:  Mary Evenshirer.  Nobody else has this surname, except maybe Mary's father, John Evenshirer, who likely died in New York City in the 1840s.


Ancestry offered this explanation of a DNA Circle.  I crossed out the part where the evidence went astray:  Mary Evenshirer had no children with Alfred Eyre.

Mary Evenshirer was my 3rd great grandmother.  Mary was born around 1842 in New York City and was probably the only surviving child of Rene Brewer (1824-1904) from Rene's marriage to John Evenshirer.  Rene remarried to George W Duryea (1823-1864) and in 1848 their first child was born, Letty Jane (died 1889).

From there, more chances for a mis-step.  Mary Evenshirer married Stephen C Duryea (1814-1887), a brother of George Duryea, and 28 years her senior.  He was a step-uncle, if such a relation exists.

Letty Jane Duryea, the half-sister of Mary Evenshirer, married Alfred DeCiplet Eyre (1848-1912) in New York City in 1868.  Letty died in Jersey City in 1889.  In 1890, Mary Evenshirer, then widowed, remarried to Alfred Eyre, her half-sister's widower.

Previously a cousin was found via DNA testing on Ancesty.  She is in the DNA Circle.

The DNA Circle links Fanny Duryea's descendant, "C J," to me.

She descends from Stephen Duryea and Mary Evenshirer's daughter, Fanny Duryea (1875-1943), who married Judson Cooke Drake (1877-1938).  My line descends from Stephen and Mary's son, Abraham Brewer Duryea (1878-1944), who married Nellie Cummins (1879-1965).  [Disposition of Nellie's ashes is unknown.]



Another cousin was also located via AncestryDNA.  He descends from Stephen and Mary's daughter, Jeanette Lent Duryea (1868-1939), who married Charles Hughes Quackenbush (1862-1947).  The family tree of this cousin is only three generations, with no mention of any of the surnames I discuss here; predictably, he was missed from this Ancestry DNA Circle.



The DNA Circle formed because a  cluster of three people surfaced at Ancestry with Mary Eyre or Mary Duryea in their trees.  Their trees did not extend back into the Brewer and Duryea lines, hence no shaky leaf designation that we share a common ancestor.  But somehow the threshold was met for a DNA Circle.

The common ancestor with this group of three people would not be Mary Evenshirer.  They descend from Mary's half-sister, Letty Jane Duryea, wife of Alfred DeCiplet Eyre.  The common ancestors would be Mary and Letty's mother, Rene Brewer AND from the other line, Garrett S Duryea (1777-1834) and Ann Cornell (1789-1871), the parents of Stephen C Duryea and George W Duryea.

Ancestry picked up on a common relation among the five of us, but chose the wrong common ancestor.  The actual family tree is tricky, as I outlined above.  Ancestry DNA Circles does not replace researching the family tree.

Revisiting Graves

My aunt gave me some pictures taken in a cemetery, probably in the late 1960s.  I recognized the setting as Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, Westchester County, New York.  My grandmother, Beulah, was buried in this cemetery in 2003.  The Brewer lot (504 and 505) is the subject of the older pictures, particularly George W Duryea (1823-1864) and Rene Brewer (1824-1904).  Beulah descends from Rene's first marriage to John Evenshirer; and from George's brother, Stephen C Duryea.  George Duryea was a policeman killed in New York City.

Brewer lot (504 and 505) at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
The rails and chains connecting the posts are disappearing.
Years from now, visitors may not be able to see that all of these stones were once in the same lot.

I tried to capture the scenes in new pictures.  The sun cast deep shadows on the stones, making them even more unreadable.  Most of the trees and bushes have been removed.

The large stone on the left is for David Mann Lent (1811-1892) and Jennet Conklin (1814-1902).

My grandmother has several ancestors buried at Sleepy Hollow, making this a great stop for exploring this branch of my family's history.

Mother:  Rene Marion Duryea (1900-1943)

Maternal grandfather:  Abraham Brewer Duryea (1878-1944)

Great grandfather:  Stephen C Duryea (1814-1887)

Great great grandparents:  Ann S Cornell (1784-1871)
Rene Brewer (1824-1904)

Great great great grandparents:  James Brewer (1798-1849)
Mary Ann Lent (1796-1875)

4X great grandparents:  Solomon Brewer (1746-1824)
Rene Benton (1764-1841)
Abraham Lent (1772-1851)
Margaret Mann (1773-1844)

Location, Location, Location! And the Name.

I made a connection at 23andMe, the genetic testing site that provides you with oodles of people who are related to you- somehow.  The irony is that this person is not related to me.

We found each other through a common surname, Puterbaugh.  She is a Puterbaugh descendant and I am not.  I listed the name as a collateral line.  William Puterbaugh married a distant cousin of mine, Mary Duryea Cornell, in the 1860s in Illinois.  I had high hopes for this branch because Mary's father, James S Cornell, was instrumental in the founding of Yorkville in Kendall County, Illinois.  His story is portrayed in history books and the ancestral angle is portrayed by genealogists.  A win-win situation.

This Puterbaugh descendant provided me with a listing of her Puterbaugh line, complete with names, variant spellings, and most importantly- locations.  Darke County, Ohio stood out for its name alone.  No Puterbaugh-Cornell marriage appeared in her direct ancestral line, though.  I realized that I had little about Mary's husband, William Puterbaugh, so I looked at Find A Grave to see if a descendant or kind soul had featured the man.  I knew I had the right guy when I saw the specifics of his birth:  1840 in "Dark Co., OH."

So we now had Puterbaughs in the same location at the same time.

A few family trees and researchers later, I was able to decide that William Puterbaugh was a second cousin to my contact's great grandfather.  Her cousin had married my cousin.  This does not make us related, but it is funny that we connected through a genetic genealogy website.