ViewsWatchersBrowse |
Coverage
Publication information
Citation
Repositories
[edit] Usage TipsAvailable at the Family History Library. WorldCat provides information on local libraries with copies of this title.
[edit] The Preamble to Gary Boyd Roberts' Introduction to this Compendium"Reprinted in these three volumes are seventeen books that compose one of the major achievements of twentieth-century genealogy---the multi-ancestor compendia (plus Thomas Haley of Winter Harbor and His Descendants, 1930) compiled and published by Walter Goodwin Davis between 1916 and 1963. These 2,300 pages (plus index) authoritatively cover 180 families, all of Davis's colonial forebears plus nineteen English families in the immediate ancestry of American immigrants. One hundred fourteen of these families lived mostly (for at least the American generations traced by Davis) in Massachusetts, twenty-nine are associated largely with Maine; and eighteen---Basford, Brown, Clifford, Cram, Estow, Fernald, Folsom, Gibbons, Gilman, Marston, Roberts, Roper, Sherburne, Sloper, Taprill, Walton, and Waterhouse---lived largely in New Hampshire, primarily Hampton, Portsmouth or Exeter. Most of the 114 Massachusetts families resided primarily in Essex County, a few in Middlesex or Plymouth counties, or in Boston; only one of these 180, Bressie of New Haven and York, shared a major association with Connecticut; and none had a lasting connection to Rhode Island. Thus Massachusetts and Maine Families in the Ancestry of Walter Goodwin Davis is largely a compendium on "north of Boston" families. It is undoubtedly, however, the premier such work for northern New England, an often essential companion volume to the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire (which it considerably expands, especially for many Essex County families with ties further north), and the greatest multi-ancestor series to date in American genealogy. Almost anyone with considerable New England ancestry--and probably 100 million contemporary Americans, about 40 percent of the population, have some colonial New England forbears--will descend from one or more, often a dozen or more, of the 180 families herein." |