From The Peopling of New York City
Samuel Myers Cohen has been very difficult to track. He has a very common name (a search of almost any database turns up a myriad of Samuel Cohen's), and did not really appear much in print.
I searched a 100-year span on the "America's Historical Newspapers" database and came up with only one entry for Samuel Myers Cohen:
He took out an ad (pictured above) in John Peter Zenger's New York Weekly Journal announcing his intent to travel to London. The ad ran on September 1st, 1740.
At the New York Public Library in Bryant Park, I asked a librarian for help tracking him down, and she pointed out a number of databases, none of which returned any results. Using the Eighteenth-Century Journals database and Accessible Archives, I searched for "Samuel Myers Cohen", "Samuel Cohen", "Myers Cohen, Samuel" and came up empty. A few weeks ago I went to the Brooklyn Public Library on Avenue J and asked for help, and was told that there are no on-site databases. I also went online to the Brooklyn Public Library's website and scanned through the databases they had available, but did not find anything that contained data from the 1700s.
Last week, I realized that NYU's library's website has as many databases as- if not more than- the New York Public Library. I borrowed an NYU NetID and password from a friend, and scanned through the databases there. I was able to access America's Historical Newspapers from there (where I found the ad pictured above), and I also searched through Early American Imprints (Series I), and came up with only one listing for Samuel Myers Cohen: Daniel Horsmanden's Journal of the Proceedings from the "slave conspiracy".
A search of Ancesty.com has returned far too many Samuel Cohen's to sort through, however the earliest few pieces of data available suggest that a Samuel Myers Cohen immigrated to the US in 1741. This seems highly unlikely, given that he had been living in New York during the spring of 1741, when the "conspiracy" events occurred, although it is possible that he traveled to London as per his advertisement, and that the information given actually marks his return to New York.
