Notes on the Manuscript Collection

This collection covers the maternal ancestry of Frank H. Noyes, with additional data on his paternal forebears. Noyes was a Boston lawyer who lived at Melrose, Mass., and pursued genealogy as a hobby. In 1952 he gave the Society his Mehitable (Plummer) Choate from Hannah and Thomas Duston and Descendants of Alvin Mayberry Waterhouse and Elizabeth Fitts (Howe) Waterhouse.

Most of the collection concerns families in western Massachusetts and New Hampshire, 1630-1960, and comprises 844 pages.  Beginning with the line of Captain John Webster (1709-1788) and his wife Susannah (Morrill) Gale (born 1717), these families include Choate, Dustin/Duston, Plumer and How(e).  The two other sections of the collection, covering descendants of David (ca. 1721-1784) and Elizabeth (Morill) Duston (d. 1754), and of John Howe of Sudbury and Marlborough, were intended by Noyes to supplement H.D. Kilgore’s A History of the Dustin Family in America (1933) and D.W. Howe’s Howe Genealogies (1929).

The material is divided into three series under a single sub-group.  Series A (Descendants of John and Susannah (Morrill) Gale Webster, and Allied Families, 1709-1960) comprises 68 folders. Series B (Descendants of David and Elizabeth (Morrill) Duston and Allied Families, ca. 1721-1960) comprises 22 folders.  Series C (Descendants of John How of Sudbury and Marlborough, Mass., 1630-1960, especially the innkeepers of the Wayside Inn in Sudbury) comprises 131 folders.

John B. Carney is a long-time Volunteer in the Manuscripts Department of the Society, and a contributor to NEXUS since 1984.  He is currently compiling a genealogy of the Fayerweather family, based on papers at NEHGS.