“This is what Queen Anne gave us in 1704,” Gwynedd Cannan was saying as she pulled out a map dating back to the British monarch’s monumental gift of Manhattan real estate to Trinity Church. She ran her finger over the grant of land stretching from today’s Fulton Street to Christopher Street, stopping along a couple of areas of rural Manhattan, as if the centuries had instantly merged.

“You’ll see the Tribeca area there,” she said, “and that’s your original Hudson Square.”

That vast territory, first called the “Queens Farm,” turned the church into the city’s biggest landlord of its time and tightly linked Trinity to the development of Lower Manhattan. More than 300 years later, no one is closer to that history than Cannan, keeper of 2,000 linear feet of church records and Downtown history.

“It’s the story of New York,” said Cannan, who took over as the Trinity Wall Street archivist in 2001.

No wonder that a number of Tribeca streets are named for early Trinity higher-ups—William Laight, John Watts, James Duane to name a few.

As the Trinity archivist, Cannan can put her hands on the very parchment that granted all that land to the church (which now owns about 8 percent of its original 215-acre gift). And older than that is the 1697 document of incorporation. Other documents contain the signatures of men such as Alexander Hamilton and his dueling killer, Aaron Burr.

“The two hated each other but they came together at Trinity,” Cannan mused.

Just as intriguing are records that trace the lives of Lower Manhattan’s ordinary families: Baptisms, marriages and burials as far back as the 18th century. Because the church was the landlord to much of Downtown’s early population, archive books reveal the names of residents at every address. A researcher from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at work on a exhibit about the famed Federal-era furniture maker Duncan Phyfe, discovered that he was one of many of his trade who settled near St. Paul’s Chapel a few blocks north of Trinity.

It was only in 1980 that the Church decided that the historical value of its documents warranted an archive at all. Cannan said the place was a disorganized “quagmire” when she arrived.

“Some things were in archival boxes and some stuff was just stacked and you’d open up the box and it wouldn’t be what it said it was,” she recalled. “Oh, it was awful!”

But Cannan said she was well prepared for the job, having had the formidable task of assembling the archives of Hollywood producer and “pack rat” David O. Selznick.

“It was a mess and I think it was more stuff than Trinity had collected in 300 years.” Cannan said it took her a year to get the church’s archives in order. And within it, much yet to be discovered.

“Historians have picked over New York’s bones for 300 years,” she said. “But here you can come back and find something new because nobody’s seen our side of the story.”