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.

Tag matrix

The Minutes Project review edition uses a manually created tag matrix of names, places, ships, dates, roles, and case-related terms. The tag matrix supports structured search and editorial review. It helps users find records that are difficult to retrieve from printed volumes, indexes, or ordinary text search.

Names and spellings vary widely in the source records. The tag matrix uses unique tokens for tagged entities so that search results can be more accurate and complete than text search alone.

Home page

After login, the home page allows searching by tagged names, places, ships, and court dates. Search boxes load a Results page. Cards load a single Minute transcript.

Only one transcript is retrieved at a time. Search boxes remain active so that users can move from one transcript or result list to another while browsing the Minutes. A user can copy and paste a name, place, ship, or date into a search box to start a fresh search.

Cards

Cards are displayed beneath the search boxes. They provide curated entry points to selected Minute transcripts. Each card opens one transcript.

Once a transcript is loaded, the search boxes remain active. Users can copy and paste from the transcript into the search boxes to continue exploring the Minutes.

Search boxes

To search, start typing in one of the Name, Place, Ship, or Court date text boxes. 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 capacity.

Click Submit to load the Results page.

Results page

The Results page shows whether each result is an admin item or litigation. It also shows a comma-delimited list of keywords to help users select a result.

Date searches show the Minute items for that court date. Default items are listed at the bottom of the page.

Click the date to load the transcript.

Transcripts

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

Under the transcript, the View Archive button opens the Internet Archive scanned source in another window.

When using the Archive scan, additional searching may be required. The scan may not align exactly with the retrieved transcript text because the transcript has been edited to support the tag matrix.

Answer Playground

The Answer Playground is disabled for the reviewer release, although it may remain visible in the interface.

It is planned as a question-based research aid for the Minutes. It is intended to help users test questions against retrieved records, cited source material, and clearly identified context.

Answers are research aids. They are not source text. They must be checked against the underlying transcript, cited records, and source scan.

Editorial method

Transcripts have been edited and tagged to support structured access. Common spellings have been standardized. Abbreviations, honorifics, and noise words have been removed. Nicknames have been expanded to full names with patronymics to support identification across the corpus.

The Secretary wrote with a quill pen and used shortcuts that can be difficult to interpret several centuries later. Tagging errors, spelling issues, and cleanup items will be found during review. Corrections will be handled as part of the ongoing editorial process.

The text has 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.

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 roadmap materials.

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.

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.

References:

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

Toya Dubin and Esme Berg, The New Amsterdam History Center, newamsterdamhistorycenter.org

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

Future source expansions will be rights-reviewed before implementation. Later translations, annotations, indexes, or published editorial material by modern scholars or institutions will not be imported, reproduced, or retrieved without explicit permission or a documented rights basis.

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 current review edition uses Google Account authentication. A Gmail address is not required if the invited user has or creates a Google Account using another email address.

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

User account information is not sold.