|
modern labors of distinguished antiquaries furnish us almost in
full their early records; and more than nine tenths of the names
in these separate communities, I think, must have been acquired
for this work. But even in my native city of Boston three or
four in a thousand may have escaped me, yet probably in the
second or third ages from its foundation.
For the time of births, marriages, or deaths in each family I
have labored assiduously to be correct, in hundreds of cases
finding wrong dates given, and commonly without hesitation
supplying the true. Where baptism is fixed, by a decent record,
weeks, and even months before the date of birth, no fear of
injuring the town clerk's credit can restrain belief in his mistake.
But the copious source of vexation is the variety growing out of
the Old and New Styles. In many thousand instances, I have
turned to the perpetual almanac, to be sure that the day of
baptism was truly, or not, recorded for Sunday, since the rite
could, in the first century of New England, be performed only
on that day. By this many printed errors may be corrected.
As children are often seen to be baptized in January or February
of the same year, by the ancient legal reckoning, that gives
the parents' marriage in April or May, several weeks before, in
our modern reckoning of the months, instead of so many months
after, it is easy enough to put that right by calling those winter
months not the eleventh and twelfth of the old year, as the statute
absurdity required. Uniformly my chronology begins the
year with 1 January; but to produce harmony between dates
for the month of March is sometimes very difficult. A few
town officers began to change the numerals for the year with
the opening of the month, daring to ask, why the first month
of 1679 should allow 24 of its 31 days to be drilled under
old 1678, while the perverse will of the rulers in fatherland
postponed the new-year's day until the 25th; and some records
may be found, where the year ended in December; but this
monstrous innovation did not begin before 1700, and the startling
truth made irregular progress up to 1752, when Lord
Macclesfield enlightened the legislature, and Chesterfield charmed
it into consistency.
No apology would be necessary for filling room with enumeration
of contributions from many friends other than such as are
|
