George Brinkerhoff

From The Peopling of New York City

George Brinkerhoff

George Brinkerhoff was a merchant from the Dock Ward with 40 pounds of wealth who was not affiliated with any party. He owned a slave, Tom, who was mentioned but not accused.

When I visited the New York Public Library, I checked the index for New York Passenger and Immigrant lists and I did not find George Brinkerhoff's name. The librarian then provided me with some old pages that were once part of a book that had information on the Brinkerhoff genealogy. It included a few points about the actual spelling of the last name, Brinkerhoff. It can sometimes be found as Brinkerhoof, Brinckerhoff, and even Blinkerhoff. When I first found this, I thought this would be some useful information for further research on George Brinkerhoff. However, I never came to any conclusions on this elusive immigrant.

The same source spoke of a George Brinkerhoff who was born in New Jersey in 1735 and died there about 1790 with 6 children. However, after searching ancestry.com and different databases, I came across many George Brinkerhoffs in 1700s, which further complicated the findings

I searched the familySearach database at the New York Public Library and based on the international genealogical index - North America there seems to be only a few different George Brinkerhoff's. There is one who kept on showing up all the time. However, even his information was very different: there is agreement that he was born in 1726 (most likely October) and died in 1797 (most likely December) but the place of birth was different for the same birth and death years, which included different neighborhoods in Queens, NY, 2 other places in New York (not in Queens) or New Jersey. Based on this research, I now think that the source I spoke of before (the old pages) does not refer to the same George Brinkerhoff in New York Burning, but there is nothing to confirm that either.

After realizing that the ancestry.com and familysearch databases were of no use without other information, I decided to type in 'George Brinkerhoff' in search fields on the NYPL, New York Historical Society site, and Google Books. The former two did not yield any results. Using Google Books, most of information on George Brinkerhoff I found did not contain specific information such as occupation. Therefore, I couldn't have just assumed it was the right person since I already knew, based on acestry.com and familysearch, that there were more than one George Brinkerhoff living in New York during the 18th century. The only piece of information that I was able to take down was one that was consistent with the ward Brinkerhoff was living in: George Brinkerhoff was assistant alderman of the Dock Ward in New York from 1740 to 1749.^[1]