Source:Brand, Robert Hanson. Vital Records of Dedham, Massachusetts 1635-1845

Usage Tips

Available at the Family History Library.

In addition to vital records births, baptisms, marriages/intentions, and deaths this book contains some town and church records.

Naming

There were over 200 links to this source page, every single one of which should have actually referenced Source:Dedham, Norfolk, Massachusetts, United States. Early Records of the Town of Dedham, Massachusetts. This was determined because the record referenced was found in that source on the page number given for this source.

One would not expect the two sources to have the same page numbers. For one thing, this source has 3 volumes, one which is only births, one which is only deaths, etc. The older source has pages of births and deaths and marriages intermixed. Access to this source is not available, but what is available is limited searching on hathitrust.org. So, for example, one could search for a name and it will display all the pages that name occurs on in this source. Spot checking showed that the page numbers in this source were different than the ones given, so the citations could not have been referring to this source.

Once all the links that should have been pointed elsewhere were corrected, there were zero left that actually referenced this source. That is not surprising. This was published recently and is under copyright and cannot be found online. So one would expect it to be sparsely referenced.

And since there is a satisfactory source published in 1886 (see above) that is easily available online and indexed for searching by various websites, one would not expect people to go out of their way (say, to a distant library) to find this source, so again, zero links is not surprising.

In considering why the source got linked so many times in error, it had to be because it was named like the standard vital records, whereas the available vital records are not. We can't name the available ones like this one, because that is not their name, so this was named author, title, instead of a place-oriented name. This was done to remove its appearance of authority for this town. It is hoped the unfamiliar name will break the habit of those that have been using this source incorrectly, and prevent new errors. This format should ensure people realize this refers to the specific set of records as presented by Robert Hanson Brand.

As mentioned, the source is not accessible. So it has not been thoroughly inspected. It is unknown how useful it is. However, in researching it, the following description was found on a bookseller's website:

This set contains an extensive collection of birth, baptism, death and marriage records for this early Massachusetts town. They have been extracted from the usual town and church records, as well as the diaries of Nathaniel Ames, old newspapers, gravestones and other private sources. These volumes correct and expand on the volume published by the town of Dedham in 1886, which was in an awkward format and had numerous errors.

The old records were a transcription, which is the gold standard, as context gives important clues about the reliability of a record (contemporary or long after the fact) and its interpretation (esp. double-dating questions). Well worth "an awkward format". Further, while all records have errors, these are primary records, and only detailed and extensive research can prove and correct errors in primary records, which makes one wonder about the nature of the "numerous errors". This appears to be largely an unnecessary duplication of an existing source. --Jrich 02:46, 4 May 2020 (UTC)