Database News

 The Early New England Families Study Project has been created to fill the need for accurate and concise published summaries on seventeenth-century New England families. Using Clarence Almon Torrey’s bibliographic index of early New England marriages and its recent successors as a guide, our goal is to compile authoritative and documented sketches to be published in searchable format on AmericanAncestors.org and, potentially, in a series of books. Following the work of Robert Charles Anderson in the Great Migration Study Project, the Early New England Families Study Project will, in the next decades, deal with more than 35,000 marriages.

The Great Migration Study Project will eventually treat all immigrants who came to New England through 1640. The Early New England Families Study Project will focus on individuals who emigrated in 1641 or later, but our sketches will be grouped by year of marriage rather than immigration. Consequently, in the transition between the two projects we cannot always simply use the year of marriage as our only benchmark. Some couples who married in 1641 had already arrived in New England, unmarried, and are being treated in the Great Migration Study Project. Some couples who arrived in 1641 were married before they came to New England. Some children who came to New England with their parents during the Great Migration were married before 1641 but were not (or will not be) fully treated in the Great Migration Study Project. The Early New England Families Study Project will continue on to treat all marriages through 1700.

Although “Torrey’s Marriages” is credited with indexing nearly all New England marriages in the seventeenth-century, some exceptions will be addressed in our project. Included in these exceptions are nonwhite and non-Protestant couples, as well as couples identified in the last fifty years.

The first sketches released for this database include the families of John Capen (m. 1637), Daniel Denison (m. 1632), George Denison (m. 1640), Edmund Hobart (m. 1632), Joshua Hobart (m. 1637), Peter Hobart (m. 1628), Thomas Hobart (m. 1629), Francis Hudson (m. 1640), and William Hudson (m. 1641).

Other online study projects include the Great Migration Study Project and Western Massachusetts Families in 1790.

If you have any questions about this, or any other database on the AmericanAncestors.org website, please contact us at webmaster@nehgs.org.

Search Early New England Families.

The dockets and extended record books for the Suffolk County Court of Common Pleas for the period 1756 - 1776 are largely missing and many scholars speculate that the British took these volumes at the time of the evacuation of Boston in 1776. The volumes have never been located in Massachusetts, and repeated searches of the Public Record Office in London and the Provincial Archives of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have failed to turn up the missing volumes.  The file papers for the period 1692-1830, however, were "rediscovered" in 1974 in the basement of the Suffolk County Court House, and a project sponsored by a series of NHPRC grants allowed those file papers to be preserved.

In 1981, the Supreme Judicial Court took over and created what has become the Supreme Judicial Court's division of Archives and Records Preservation.  That organization compiled this index and abstract of the cases in the 1756-1776 period.  Each abstract contains plaintiff and defendant information, the type of action, number of documents in the case, date filed, year and term the case was decided, amount of damages, and the attorney or individual filing the case. If present, additional information concerning the verdict, co-plaintiffs, co-defendants, and others involved in the case is included in a notes section.  Unfortunately, no other information is available for these cases, the associated record books having been lost.

The larger collection of Suffolk County Court of Common Pleas file papers of which this index presents a part is stored at the Massachusetts Archives, Columbia Point, Boston. For information concerning use of that collection, contact the Supreme Judicial Court's division of Archives and Records Preservation.

Other court record collections offered through our online databases include Bristol County, Mass. Extracts from Court of General Sessions of the Peace, 1697-1801; Middlesex County, Mass. Abstracts of Court Records, 1643-1674; and Plymouth Court Records, 1686-1859.

If you have questions about this or any other database collection offered through our website, you may contact us at webmaster@nehgs.org.

Search the Suffolk County Court of Common Pleas.

The database "Massachusetts Soldiers in the Colonial Wars" has been updated and renamed "Colonial Soldiers and Officers in New England, 1620-1775." This update includes images of the source material as well as the addition of search fields to assist in the location of records relevant to your research.

Prior to the American Revolution many men served in the militia and fought against Native Americans, the French, and other opponents. Many of these battles were extensions of European wars. This database contains over 35,000 records of service for individuals in Massachusetts and other New England states who served from the seventeenth century to the Battle of Lexington and Concord. These records, originally published by the New England Historic Genealogical Society with support from the Society of Colonial Wars in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts between 1975 and 1985, were compiled from many different sources to create as comprehensive a list as possible. Not all individuals who gave service are represented here, however.

More details about the individual resources included in this database can be found in the citation information provided by our database catalog. This database can be found by selecting "Military Records" from the drop-down menu located on this page. You can also download PDF copies of the introductions to these resources from this page.

Other military records databases offered by our website include Index of Revolutionary War Pensioners and Vermont Soldiers in World War I.

If you have any questions about this, or any other database on the AmericanAncestors.org website, please contact us at webmaster@nehgs.org.

Search the Colonial Soldiers and Officers in New England, 1620-1775

This database is based on Colony of Connecticut, Minutes of the Court of Assistants, 1669-1711 which was written by Helen Schatvet Ullmann and published by NEHGS in 2009.

This database is based wholly upon Black Families in Hampden County, Massachusetts, 1650-1865 (2nd Edition) by Joseph Carvalho III, which was published by NEHGS in 2011.

From the introduction: "Hampden County, Massachusetts, was a significant center of African American life between the years 1650 and 1865. Its location at the “crossroads of New England,” close over the border from Connecticut to the south and across the wide Hudson River and a mountain range away from slavery in New York to the west, made Hampden County a haven for escaped slaves. The establishment in Springfield of the U.S. Armory in 1794 placed the town at the very epicenter of America’s Industrial Revolution. The main body of the work consists of genealogical and biographical information in alphabetical order by surname. There is a separate alphabetical list of individuals only known by their slave names."

Our bookstore also offers this resource in hard copy: Black Families in Hampden County, Massachusetts, 1650-1865, Revised Edition.

Search Hampden County, MA: Black Families in Hampden County, 1650-1865

Families of Ancient New Haven — Completely Re-indexed  

This eight-volume, 2,100-page database has been completely re-indexed, increasing the number of name entries from 65,000 to 92,000. The original index was based on a work which only indexed the names of individuals who did not have the same surnames as the featured families. The new all-name index provides many more search results.Families of Ancient New Haven is an eight-volume work created by Donald Lines Jacobus between 1923 and 1932. These volumes were originally published as New Haven Genealogical Magazine, which was the predecessor of The American Genealogist.

Search Families of Ancient New Haven

Armenian Immigrant Marriages in Massachusetts - 1880-1915

This database of marriages of Armenian immigrants to Massachusetts was created by William Andreas Brown as a means for furthering Armenian heritage research in Massachusetts.  The database contains marriage information for 3,565 individuals married in Massachusetts with surnames ending in "ian" or "yan".  The information is searchable by the individual's first and last name and by the father's first name, the mother's first and last name, and the spouses first and last name.  All data was compiled from Massachusetts vital records data contained on AmericanAncestors.org and FamilySearch.org.  Information in the "Notes" section was gathered from personal experience, Ancestry.com and other genealogy websites.

Search Armenian Immigrant Marriages in Massachusetts - 1880-1915

If you have any questions about this, or any other database on the AmericanAncestors.org website, please contact us at webmaster@nehgs.org.

NEHGS is happy to announce an agreement with the Rhode Island Genealogical Society that allows us to add Rhode Island Roots to our growing collection of nationally-renowned scholarly publications. 

When Rhode Island Roots began publication in 1975, the publication served both as a newsletter for the newly formed Rhode Island Genealogical Society(RIGS) and as an aid to careful genealogical research. While it was short and unsophisticated in design, Roots was a serious publication assembled by people with considerable genealogical experience. 

Each issue of the quarterly journal, now 52 pages, features at least one compiled genealogy along with Bible records, transcriptions of original sources, book reviews, and studies of the genealogical implications of historical events. Indices of land and Notarial records and petitions to the General Assembly, transcriptions of estimates of ratable estate, gravestones, and early census records all provide invaluable clues to Rhode Island genealogy. The authors include well-known genealogists as well as RIGS members with stories of their own families to tell. 

Other Rhode Island databases available through our digital collections include Rhode Island Vital Records, 1636-1850; Rhode Island Historical Cemeteries Database Index; and Members of the Artillery Company of Newport, Rhode Island.

If you have any questions about this, or any other database on the AmericanAncestors.org website, please contact us at webmaster@nehgs.org.

Search Rhode Island Roots.