#35 Royal Descents, Notable Kin, and Printed Sources: Spotting Easy-to-Trace Lines, Part 2
Gary Boyd Roberts
Continuing my “QuickSearch”
guide to easy-to-trace lines, for 18th-century or pioneer ancestors check the
3-vol. DAR Patriot Index and the various pension indexes and abstracts
by V.D. White (Revolutionary abstracts esp.), census indexes (through 1860,
often 1870, sometimes later), and mugbook indexes discussed and listed in
chapter 8 of J. Carlyle Parker’s Going to Salt Lake City to Do Family
History Research (3rd ed., 1996). For these military, census, biographical
and a few other “pioneer” sources see my brief essay on the subject in The
American Genealogist (TAG) 72 (1997): 399-402.
For
17th-century New England forebears of your “pioneer” ancestors, check C. A.
Torrey’s New England Marriages Prior to 1700 (microfilm ed. in 7 reels,
1979; book ed., without references, but with a wives and surname index, 1985;
CD-ROM version in preparation), a listing of all 37,000 married couples in
17th-century New England, and all references to either partner in everything
published through 1960. New England immigrants through 1633 are covered in R. C.
Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins, 3 vols. Publication of a second
series of this last project, covering immigrants of 1634 and 1635, begins this
fall with a volume covering A and B surnames.For origins abroad of early New
England immigrants check English Origins of New England Families From
NEHGR, 6 vols. in 2 series, H. F. Waters’s Genealogical Gleanings in
England, 2 vols., and Register 150 (1996): 454-61 (a bibliography
of origins studies published in the Register, 1984-96), plus the works
by Torrey and Colket listed above, and the second section of Mrs. Worden’s
subject index for TAG, vols. 1-60. I have also published some bibliographies by
immigrant of early settlers of Rhode Island and Middlesex Co., Mass., and of
Mayflower passengers and royally-descended immigrants, and contributed to
such a bibliography for Sandwich, Mass. families. The bibliography of early
Middlesex Co. testators appears in the July 1999 Register, and my other
surname bibliographies are listed on the last page of that article.
For
Mayflower ancestors, check firstly the 18 volumes of “silver book” Genealogies
of Mayflower Families for Five Generations, plus the “pink pamphlets”
of four-generation preliminary studies for future “silver book” volumes. These
books and pamphlets cover all passengers except John Howland, the progeny of
whose two eldest children is covered in two five-generation volumes by Elizabeth
Pearson White (the progeny of another child, Mrs. Ruth Howland Cushman, is
covered in the Isaac Allerton volume, and five generations of the progeny of
other children appear in a useful but undocumented 1970 work by Mrs. Curtis J.
Hunter). Other Mayflower works of import include Genealogies of
Mayflower Families From NEHGR, 3 vols., Mayflower Source Records From
NEHGR, E. A. Stratton’s Plymouth Colony: Its History & People,
1620-1691, the several GPC works by Susan E. Roser (VRs, deeds and probates from
The Bowman Files, plus Mayflower Increasings, a
three-generation study of the progeny of all 23 passengers), and the 45+ vols.
of The Mayflower Descendant, until recently edited by Alicia Crane
Williams.
For New England problems that remain after all of the above
sources have been exhausted, try three large databases - the Mormon
International Genealogical Index (use the Ancestral File with caution), the
American Genealogical-Biographical Index (200 vols. to date, through
Wilson, esp. useful for references to the Boston Transcript
genealogical column, the best query source in American genealogy) and, although
it is mentioned above and should already have been used, the 6-vol. set of
every-name indexes to the Register. If you find nothing in any of the
above sources or these three databases, my best advice is to “give up” on
printed sources for awhile and turn to documentary records in archives,
courthouses and town halls.
A few “QuickSearch” sources for a few
non-New England areas may also be in order. Suggestions for the mid-Atlantic and
Southern states appear in columns 16-18 and 28-30. Post-1840 “ethnic” topics are
treated in column 9. If your ancestors were 18th-century Germans, check the
works of Hank Jones (Palatines, to New York esp.) or Annette Burgert (immigrants
into Philadelphia around 1750 esp.), plus various post-Roots
single-family genealogies as well. For the 19th-century Irish, check Famine
Immigrants (7 vols., to NYC 1846-51), The Search for Missing
Friends (8 vols., transcriptions of advertisements published 1831-1920
[vol. 8 is at press]), and among the Society’s microtext holdings, the Spinning
Wheel Survey of 1796, Griffiths’ Valuation and the Tithe Applotment Books, which
three sources together act as a kind of substitute census for Ireland,
1800-1840.
If your ancestors are French Canadian, check the compendia by
Jetté and Tanguay, the 47 vols. of Répertoires (baptisms and marriages)
to 1765, and the Loiselle (covering 540 parishes) and Drouin marriage indexes.
For other 19th-century groups, Germans to America (60 vols. to date,
arrivals after 1850), Italians to America (11 vols.), and Migration
from the Russian Empire (6 vols., mostly Polish and Jewish) cover
immigrants to NYC from Germany, Italy and Russia through the early or mid-1890s.
Works by Robert Swearinga, Gerhard Naeseth, Rabbi Malcolm Stern, and Mary
Voultros cover 19th-century Dutch, Norwegian (to 1850), Sephardic Jewish (to
1840), and Massachusetts Greek immigrants (1885-1910). If recent ancestors have
belonged to the English gentry, especially to the “roving” gentry or civil
service in Canada, Australia, South Africa, India, or elsewhere in the British
colonies, check Burke’s Family Index for surnames in Burke’s
Peerage, Landed Gentry, or other Burke’s works, and the bibliographies (of
English pedigrees published through 1975 or so) by George Marshall, J. B.
Whitmore, and Geoffrey Barrow. Descendants of the last Plantagenets are covered,
with some gaps, in Ruvigny’s Plantagenet Roll of the Blood Royal, 5
vols., reprinted by GPC in 1994.
For royal descents check my 1993
compendium, The Royal Descents of 500 Immigrants (RD500, with additions
in the summer 1996 issue of NEXUS), the 1996 first edition of Plantagenet
Ancestry of Seventeenth-Century Colonists by David Faris, and the most
recent editions of Ancestral Roots (7th), Magna Charta
Sureties, 1215 (5th), and Royalty for Commoners (this last on the
ancestry of the children of Edward III). A second edition of David Faris’s work
will appear later this year, and a second edition of my RD500 is
scheduled for 2001. Don Stone has compiled wonderful charts on our likely
ancient lines (to classical Greece, Egypt, Persia, Rome, and Asia Minor), and H.
M. West Winter has outlined, in 10 vols. at NEHGS, 16 generations of the
descendants of Charlemagne - to about 1250-1300.
After tracing much of
your New England and other ancestry, I hope you will look at my other volumes on
notables - American Ancestors and Cousins of The Princess of Wales
(1984), Ancestors of American Presidents (1995), and Notable Kin,
Volume One and Volume Two (1998-99). Most readers with 50+ Great Migration
New England ancestors will find between 50 and 100 famous distant cousins in
these works, and many readers with Tidewater Virginia forebears will find
several dozen. Once again, I hope this “QuickSearch” survey of printed sources
that often allow us to trace half or more of our ancestry easily, proves helpful
to many readers. In my next column I shall return to a survey review of
interesting kinships in Notable Kin, Volume Two, and discuss some
ancestors of Yankee inventors and artists.