Massachusetts and Maine Families, 1650s-1930s

Description

This CD contains images of the pages of two important works, Leonard Smith’s “Cape Cod Library of Local History and Genealogy” and Walter Goodwin Davis’s “Massachusetts and Maine Families,” which between them refer to approximately 80,000 individuals. “Cape Cod Library of Local History and Genealogy” is based on a little-known series of 108 pamphlets published at Yarmouthport by Charles W. Swift in the early part of this century. Col. Leonard Smith put together a complete collection for himself, arranged the pamphlets in the order in which they were published, and then compiled an index of names. In just over 2,000 pages he managed to put together a reference work that compensates for the chronic shortage of printed Cape Cod source material. Walter Goodwin Davis’s “Massachusetts and Maine Families” treats all 180 families deriving from each of his sixteen great-great-grandparents. Almost anyone with considerable New England ancestry–and as many as 100 million living Americans, about 40 percent of the population, have some colonial New England forebears–will descend from one or more, often a dozen or more, of the 180 families covered here. Most of the 114 Massachusetts families resided in Essex County, a few in Middlesex or Plymouth counties, or in Boston.