James Riker

Who was James Riker?

James Riker was a New York historian and genealogist. His father, James Riker was a merchant and landowner descended from early Dutch settlers. Riker left school at the age of sixteen to work in his father's business.

During the late 1830s and early 1840s he lived intermittently in Goshen, New York, where he ran a store. By the mid-1840s he had settled at the family home on Delancey Street in Manhattan. There Riker studied informally for the Presbyterian ministry and began the genealogical and historical research that would occupy him for much of his life. He collected original documents from the colonial era, copied extracts from documents in state and local archives and corresponded extensively with historians, relatives and old family friends. In 1848 Riker moved with his father to a new family home near to the corner of Fifth Ave. and 125th Street, Harlem. Two years later, having given up his plans for a religious career, he began work as a teacher in New York's Ward School 24. James Riker's first publication, a pamphlet genealogy that traced the Riker family to their early Dutch origins, appeared in 1851.