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William Buffington Jr.

American politician

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 24, 2026
Entity authorityQ109658558
Source-derived summary

William Buffington Jr. (May 31, 1817 – January 21, 1881) was an American farmer, hotel keeper, and politician from New York.

Life

Buffington was born on May 31, 1817, in Cambridge, New York, the son of William Buffington Sr. and Harriet Churchill.

Buffington moved to Marcellus with his family in 1818, and then to New Albion in 1826. He attended common schools in the latter place and spent a few months in a high school in what later became Gowanda. He was elected inspector of schools while still relatively young and later became elected town superintendent of schools for five consecutive terms. He began working as a farmer when he was twenty. When the New York and Erie Railroad was established, he built and ran a hotel in the village of Cattaraugus.

Buffington represented New Albion as town supervisor in 1849, 1850, and 1857.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “William Buffington Jr.” is american politician. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through William, Buffington and American, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1817, 1881, 1818, 1826—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1817-01-01. For this dossier, William, Buffington and American is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american politician” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q109658558. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1817, 1881, 1818 and 1826.

Critical limits

A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “William Buffington Jr.”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow William Buffington Jr. primary sources, William Buffington Jr. archive and William research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “William Buffington Jr.”?
  2. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from William Buffington Jr.” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.