Shaded in yellow is School District No. 5 in the town of Ellicott as defined on the 1934 map of school districts in the town of Ellicott. Notice that it extends north into the town of Gerry as does the school district to the west. School District No. 5 is in the northeast corner of the town east of Ross Mils and north of Levant.

Fall is here and the time to return to school has arrived.

Schools have been in the news and on the minds of many throughout the area and the nation. There are many schools and school districts throughout the area, each with a variety of school buildings and student population, be it small or large. In the late 1930s and through the 1940s, there was a push by New York State for the then many small school districts to centralize into a larger school district. And there have been some mergers of those school districts with another in more recent times, as well as, failed attempts to merge districts.

Looking back at the school districts of the area before the centralization push can be difficult as records can be scattered. This is not covering the school records of the individual students. That is a whole different subject and involves all the privacy concerns of today. In early days here, school was not as regulated as it is today. Students seldom continued through all the grade levels that we have today. Often boys quit going to school when they were old enough to help on the farm or even in the family business. Girls often never finished school. School in the early days of the agricultural period in our history operated around the seasons, by not having school sessions during planting and harvesting times.

School districts were often defined by the area that had residents with children of school age. Occasionally the district borders changed as the children advanced in age and left school. Some school districts straddled town lines. In the 1930s there were maps produced for the towns in Chautauqua County and probably throughout the state of the school districts.

At least one copy of the map was filed with the town clerk of the town. The one for the town of Ellicott was published in 1934 and a copy is in the clerk’s office. It has now been copied and enlarged and hangs on a wall in the town building. It is in color so each school district is defined by color. Land owner’s names are included on the map. This gives us a neighborhood whose children attended school together.

In New York state residents are taxed to support the schools. So school tax lists over the years also give us the names of the tax payers by district which were small enough to be rural neighborhoods. Family historians and genealogists are happy to find these records because they help to put a family in context of the neighborhood and school district. Often these are the children who grow up and marry the neighbor from down the road that was a fellow schoolmate. There are many stories in family history of discovering that it was in school that the great-grandfather met the girl who became his wife and thus the great-grandmother in the family. Remember these were often one and two room schoolhouses where children of all ages were together in the same classroom.

There are a few records of the Ellicott school districts in the archival records of the town of Ellicott. There are a few tax lists for some of the districts and some boundary changes of the school districts, mostly from the first part of the 1900s. Hopefully each school district today has some records from the earlier schools, as well as, records of, and since centralization.

The trustees of each school district in New York State had to submit an annual report. These included the names and ages of the children of school age, the name of the head of the household (parent or guardian), sometimes the names of the teacher and the trustees. Also included could be the town in which the family resided if different from the school district. Remember some districts straddled the town lines. Many of these trustees reports for the towns in Chautauqua County are at the Chautauqua County Historical Society in Westfield.

The Chautauqua County Genealogical Society has extracted the information from these reports and published the information for each town. The years covered were mostly from the 1880s through to about 1910. Not all years for every district were found. There are none for the city of Jamestown in that collection. The publications can be found at the Research Center of the Fenton History Center and at other libraries in the county. So where did your family members attend school and in what conditions were they educated?