GenWeb of Monroe County, NY

Welcome to the home for genealogy for Monroe County, New York.

While you are here, be sure to check out all the cemetery records, the many queries, vital records, maps, and the page of links to many other genealogy pages. Also, there is a page with the genealogical resources available here in Monroe County. It also gives some addresses of where to write for more information. Another page lists both town and village historians. New York State is very difficult to do genealogical research in. You will need to check many sources to find information on your family.

Monroe County was formed in 1821 from Ontario (east of the Genesee River) and Genesee Counties. There were only a few thousand people living here at that time. The Erie Canal helped bring many thousand of people into the County and, in many cases, also helped them move on west. There is also a short page with more detailed information on the formation of Monroe County. There also is a page with information on the formation of Towns and Villages in Monroe County. This page also includes a map showing the location of the Towns within the County.

There is a listing of Monroe County Genealogical Resources. It has addresses of government offices and libraries and also a list of genealogical researchers in this area.

Check out this page of links for Rochester, Monroe County and New York State genealogical sources that will lead to even more sources.

There are many cemetery records. Most are lists of tombstone inscriptions but a few also include burial records. Not every cemetery is available and probably never will be as some are very large.

There are some vital records and also a few church records from Monroe County, NY.

Monroe Co. place names - (alphabetical) from the US Geological Survey. Then you can view a map showing that place. This includes some cemeteries, schools, creeks and hamlets.

There are maps of the Towns in Monroe County. There are also a few more maps listed on the links page.

Historic Highway Markers of Monroe County, NY. Learn a little history of Monroe County by viewing these history markers.

This set of pages have biographies that were published in histories of Rochester and Monroe County and were published in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

There are some on-line books of Monroe County including some by Arch Merrill. Arch had a newspaper column for many years and the books tell the history of the area. The web page also give links to on-line books of Monroe County that are at the Rochester Public Library site and elsewhere on the web.

You can search through all the web pages on this site using Pico Search or Google. For best results, start out with just a surname in the search box. Putting in common given names such as "Mary" or "John" will give positive results for too many pages.

Neither search site searches the message board nor the mail list (see below).

Mail List

There is also a mail list for Monroe Co., NY (NYMONROE-L) that is hosted by RootsWeb. This mail list (as are others) is a method of exchanging genealogical information of Monroe County via e-mail. Messages posted to the list are sent to everyone on the list. Suitable message topics include (but not limited to) information from your own research and requests for assistance from others; reviews, criticism, and questions about software and hardware used in connection with genealogy; and messages about good places to find genealogy information, be those places bookstores, libraries, or the internet. In order to receive messages, you must be subscribed.

If you are familiar with mail lists, then you can subscribe by sending a message with only the word "subscribe" in the body to: NYMONROE-L-request@rootsweb.com (for individual messages)

If you need more information about this mail list, go to the NYMONROE-L web page.

Message Board

Click on the wagon to go to the Message Board.

The Monroe County Message Board is located on Ancestry.com. Much of Ancestry.com is commercial but the message boards are free. You do have to register to post messages to the board. Once you are on the board, you can search the message board for any name or word within the messages. So if a name is mentioned in the text of the message, you will still be able to find the surname (or word). If you are getting too many messages from a search, try using the Advanced Search which can search within just subject, text, within a certain time, etc..


This page is part of the NYGenWeb Project, the USGenWeb Project and the World GenWeb Project.

This main page doesn't change very often. You can check for additions on the What's New page or just check back ever so often.
The GenWeb of Monroe County was created 17 July 1996 Moved to RootsWeb on 18 Nov. 2000 Moved to mcnygenealogy.com on 26 March 2008 28 Aug. 2010		is this website's host.