Sources: These outstanding works chronicle existing population statistics: American Population Before the federal Census of 1790, by Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington (New York, 1932), 88-105, a colony-by-colony compendium of very useful population statistics; and Robert V. Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data (Princeton, NJ, 1975), an interesting analysis of those statistics. The core printed source for colonial New York census data is DHNY 1:687-97.

* = estimated population statistic. These often represented an observer's guess! Population estimates for New Netherland are considered by Oliver A. Rink, in Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca and London, 1986), 164-65. For the overall colonial era, Greene and Harrington, American Population, 88-92 chronicles a number of historic estimates.

+ = population statistic by census. However, please understand that the colonial census was a much more imperfect counting of heads than is the case today.