In Part 2 I basically came to the conclusion that there is very little chance that any of the old City Court records still exist. Besides old newspapers, there are two sets of records that you might want to look at for people convicted of criminal offenses in City (or Police) Court.

1. – On Ancestry.com are records that you can search of “New York, U.S., Governor’s Registers of Commitments to Prisons, 1842-1908.” These records were digitized at the New York State Archives in Albany. They include people that were sent to the Monroe County Penitentiary (jail) from the Rochester City Police Court.

For a charge of public intoxication, a person could be sentenced from 5 to 60 days. A charge of vagrancy could land a person in the jail from 10 to 90 days. And there are a lot of people being convicted of those charges. Punishments seem much harsher in those days than today.

These records cover many jails around the State. If you have a Ancestry subscription, search and see if you have any relatives that ended up in a jail in Rochester or New York State.

2. – Twenty or 30 years ago John Noble gave a talk to the Rochester Genealogical Society. At that time he was the head of the Rochester Municipal Archives. He mentioned a set of records that they had; Criminal Identification Cards. A description of these records is to be found in Guide to Historical Resources in Monroe County, New York Repositories, Volume 1. That description says that the Archives has approximately 20,000 cards from about 1903 to 1975. The cards include name, age, place of birth, occupation, residence, arrest date, charge, and photos of the person.

Early ID cards also contain data based on the system initiated by Alphonse Bertillon (link is to his Wikipedia article). Those cards would include odd measurements like arm length and ear length (see below). That system went into less use when fingerprinting became the norm in the late 20s or early 30s.

Two years ago I talked to a lady at the Archives and she didn’t know about these cards. Then recently I talked to a young man at the Archives and he also didn’t know about the cards. I don’t know of anyone that has ever asked for one of these ID cards. You would have to fill out a Freedom of Information Law form (FOIL) request and hope for the best.

I found the above card on a Monroe County Sheriff’s group on Facebook. It came from the Historian of the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department. I talked to him and he had bad news. He said at one time the Department had thousands of these cards. When they moved to new headquarters in the 1970s they discarded most of them. He only has about 500 of these cards that he uses as a teaching tool for new recruits to the Sheriff’s Department.

The above card is for August Panknin who was arrested for stealing pears off a tree in 1908. He got 50 days in the Monroe County Penitentiary for his crime. Then a November 1908 newspaper account says he was trying to vote in the election but couldn’t remember his address. He was arrested for public intoxication. For that he received a sentence of either a $10 fine or 5 months in jail. He went to jail. I found both of his records of commitment to jail in those above records on Ancestry (1.).

Do you see any mistakes? Do you have any suggestions about these or similar records? Leave a comment or send me an email (dickhalsey@gmail.com).

Next: Starting on County Court Records