I’ve been devoting considerable time of late to doing more extensive genealogical research into several lines of my own New England ancestors.

 

As a part of this process, I have gathered together some really exceptional reference materials for early settlers to the Massachusetts Bay Colony that may be of value to you or other of our Compatriot brothers and sisters in lineage societies like the SAR, DAR, CAR, and GWS1812.  I thought I would make you aware that I have purchased these reference books and maintain them here in my own library at home.

 

I would be more than willing to check through these works as our travel commitments and available research time allows for you; or,  any of our friends who may be looking for information on some of their own ancestral connections to era in the Colony of Massachusetts. (Some contain limited information on other colonies).

 

I have available:

 

Volumes I, II, and III of Robert Charles Anderson’s monumental study, “The Great Migration Begins”, covering the period between 1620 and 1633.  This seminal work contains historical sketches of many of the earliest arrivals to New England beginning with the Pilgrims. Publ’ by New England Historical Genealogical Society, 1995.

 

“Immigrant Ancestors” by Frederick Adams Virkus (Extracted from Volume VII, Compendium of American Genealogy, Chicago, 1942.  This volume contains brief biographical materials on 2,500 immigrants to America before 1750.

 

“Pioneers of Massachusetts, 1620-1650”, by Charles Henry Pope, original copyright by Pope in 1900, this volume is the 2013 NEHGS reprint with a foreword by Scott C. Steward.  This is one of the essential research sources used by Anderson in his early stages of work on GNB (above) and contains the earliest known accounts of the earliest arrivals to this country.

 

“A History and Antiquities of Every Town in Massachusetts”, by John Warner Barber, with foreword by Alice S. Kane.  First published by Barber in 1839, this work contains important information about the earliest settlements, villages and towns of the Massachusetts Bay Colony through to the date of publication in 1839.  This volume even includes the earliest known Native American place names for settled areas at the time of the arrival of the first Europeans into the areas.  This is the 2014 NEHGS reprint of the original work.

 

“Soldiers in King Philip’s War”, by George Madison Bodge with a forward by NEHGS Chief Genealogist, David Allen Lambert.  Published by NEHGS in 1891, this is the 2014 reprint of the original.  Many historians credit the successes of colonial troops against the well trained British forces in the American Revolutionary War with the fact that the insurgents had in many cases obtained considerable military experience in fighting Native American predations in the one-hundred and fifty plus years between the earliest arrivals to the New World and the outbreak of warfare with Great Britain.  The period of “King Philip’s War” (1675-1676) saw many of the bloodiest fighting between local militia units and native peoples, and this book gives essential histories of many of those engagements as well as extensive rosters of the militiamen involved* in the fighting.

• Finding an ancestor on one of these rosters can provide the basis for membership in other lineage associations like “First Families of Massachusetts”, “Founders and Patriots”, “Colonial Wars”, and other military societies.

 

“New England Captives Carried to Canada”, between 1677 and 1760, during the French and Indian Wars”, by Emma Lewis Coleman, with a foreword by Donald R. Friary.  Published in 1925, this work represents decades of research conducted by Coleman, and C. Alice Baker (author of True Stories of New England Captives Carried to Canada, 1897).

This work compiles what is known about the captive men, women and children, as well as their fate at the hands of their captors.  This is the 2012 reprint of the original work by NEHGS, and has been considered to be the “go-to” resource and most definitive work ever published on the subject for nearly a century.

 

So….if you would, please pass the offer along to others.  Have folks send me an e-mail providing me with what information as they might have and I will get back to them with whatever I can dig up; or, at least an idea of when I might be able to get to their request.

 

 

 

David

diggeroneztab@gmail.com