New York State Documents: A Finding Aid: Historic Legislative Documents

Olin Reference has print guides to the Legislative Series of Documents which are invaluable for locating individual documents in these large sets.

Similar documents following this set were received and cataloged individually either as serials or monographs.
Search the Cornell Library Catalog for individual titles.

From 1820 to 1829, legislative documents were published in their entirety in the Journal of either body (see Legislative Journals, below). The most important component of our historic New York State documents collection is the bound series of collected documents known as the "Legislative series of documents," covering 1830 through 1976. These series include not only legislative documents but also some publications of the executive and judicial branches.

Many of these volumes are also available in microprint sets and cataloged individually.

To locate these volumes, search the Journal of the Senate of the State of New York or the Journal of the Assembly of the State of New York and then Limit by Publication Year (select a range of years since the year published doesn't always correspond to the years covered) or include the session number, written out, e.g. "thirty-forth session."

The New York State Historical Literature collection contains electronic versions of scattered 19th century NYS documents among its 655 browseable and searchable online titles scanned and indexed by CUL. Browsing the titles beginning with "New York State" is one way to see what's available here.

There are no subject indexes to the Journal, per se. However, the New York Times Index (1851 to date) and Historical Index to the New York Times [online] (1863-1905, 1913-September 1922) can serve as a surrogate subject indexes. Legislative proceedings are often discussed in the newspaper.

For detailed information on historic New York state documents, consult: