This article originally appeared on the Times Union website.
Stefan Bielinski, a social historian at the New York State Museum for nearly five decades who compiled a one-of-a-kind historical database of Albany's history and inhabitants during the city's colonial period, died last Tuesday. He was 77.
Bielinski had suffered from several health problems including heart issues over the last few years.
"That is no surprise to me," said Tricia Barbagallo, a close friend and longtime collaborator. "He had the biggest heart in the world."
Steve Bielinski, as he was known to colleagues, scholars and the hundreds of men and women whose careers in the humanities he nurtured, was a historian who sought to answer one key question: What did it mean to be a commoner in colonial Albany? He was interested in the lives of regular people who lived in the city between roughly 1624 and 1820.
His life's work was the Colonial Albany Social History Project, a database of 16,000 people who lived in the city before 1800. It was the first historical collection of its kind to be stored and maintained on computers and remains accessible online today. No other city in the world has such a granular accounting of its early residents, Barbagallo said. Read more...
