New England Boasts Thorough Records

Whenever possible, arrange to have your ancestors born in New England. That’s the happy hunting ground for genealogists.

Kory Meyerink offered that sage advice at the Montana State Genealogical Society conference a while back.

“No place is as well-indexed or more thoroughly documented in records as in New England,” he says. So those fortunate enough to research in this part of America are perhaps a bit luckier than those who must struggle elsewhere.

Librarian that Meyerink is, he talks of the shelf space New England resource requires: The New England Historical Genealogical Society was founded in 1847, and its publication, The Register, requires 40 feet of shelves. Most of what The Register has published over the past 150 years has been New England records, abstracts from vital records and family histories.

Meyerink says there are about 100,000 published family histories today, and “you could fill this room, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with books about New England families.”

The first step in researching your New England kin is to make a diligent search of what has already been published. There are more than 6 million entries in the American Genealogical & Biographical Index, found in most larger genealogical libraries.

The database is available online at Ancestry.com for a fee and will soon be available on CD-ROM discs.

“But as great as this is, it only indexes 850 sources,” he said, “so do check elsewhere.”

The International Genealogical Index has nearly 18 million names - most born before 1850. IGI is available at the Family History Center nearest you.

A fairly new source for New England research is the series by Robert Charles Anderson, “The Great Migration Begins, 1620-1633.” It’s a great source for the earliest European families.

“As far as census records,” Meyerink said, “there are no missing census records for New England from 1790 through 1860, except for a few towns.”

The book series “Massachusetts Vital Records to 1850” is a genealogist’s dream set, he said.

“The law to collect and compile these records was passed in 1841,” Meyerink said. “You need to know that these records come from a variety of sources, but they’re mostly town and church records. You also need to know that some towns are better represented than others because some clerks were more diligent in their recording.”

Understanding migration patterns in New England is helpful. “The easiest travel was by water,” he said, “so settlements sprang up along the rivers and the seacoast. Vermont was the last state to be settled because it was hard to get to.”

The real key to New England research is getting to town records. Many genealogists use “New England Town Records” by Ann Lainhart, which lists all town records with the exception of vital records.

Today’s Laugh: Fond as we are of genealogical finds, we should also appreciate good humor about it. This 1917 story comes from the New York Tribune.

She: We can trace our ancestry back to the year 1400!

He: Indeed?

She: How far back does your ancestry go?

He: Well, one of my ancestors fought with William the Conqueror. Another was a night watchman for Cleopatra. And, it’s said that another ancestor had a diplodocus ranch next door to Adam’s place. If fact, Mrs. Eve was always complaining about the young diplodocus eating her clothes off the line.”

She: Sir!! she said and retired.

He: Dangunit, I guess that’ll hold her for a while.

(FYI: a diplodocus was a huge, plant-eating dinosaur.)