KEY TO SKETCH
HEADINGS
Except for
that minority of persons who left behind one or two records
in New England, each of the persons treated in the Great Migration
Study Project is presented according to a fixed format, which
forces research to answer a series of questions. There are three
sections that are rigidly formatted, and then a more informal
section.
The first
section asks questions related directly to the movements of
the family or individual from the date of the last known residence
in England to the end
of his, her or their lives. Entries in this section will generally
be brief.
The second
group of questions is of a biographical nature, attempting to
provide answers about education, officeholding, wealth and so
on.
The third
formatted section presents the specifically genealogical material:
birth, death, spouses and children.
These three
sections are followed by a free-form space, in which a variety
of matters may be discussed, and finally, in some cases, a bibliographic
note for those families that have been treated in print several
times.
The rest
of this section proceeds through the parts of a sketch, pointing
out what is likely to be found under each heading, and what
is not.
PRESERVED
PURITAN
ORIGIN:
The origin for our purposes is the last known residence in England
or Holland before migration. This will frequently be different
from the place of birth, and knowledge of this difference can
be important in assessing the motivation for migration, and
connecting the immigrant with others who made the move about
the same time. The place of birth will be given as the place
of origin only when no other residence in England
is known.
If any residence
in England other than
the place of birth is known, it will be given here even if it
was many years before the date of migration. For example, Bigod
Eggleston, who was born at Settrington, Yorkshire, lived at
a later date in Norwich, Norfolk, but was last seen there in
1614, sixteen years before he came to New England. Presumably
he lived somewhere else in England
in the 1620s, but for now we give his origin as Norwich.
An origin
will be given only when there is solid evidence. If someone
in the past has made a plausible suggestion, or if there is
a leading clue, the entry here will be “Unknown,” and there
will be discussion of the possibilities in the COMMENTS
section. (Information on place and date of birth, if known,
will be given in the genealogical portion of the sketch, under
BIRTH.)
MIGRATION:
In this section we attempt to determine the year in which this
person or family migrated to New England. If we are fortunate
enough to have an entry on a passenger list, the year will be
given, along with the name of the vessel. Where there is no
passenger list entry (the majority of the cases), the year of
migration is estimated from the evidence available. For example,
it will frequently be the case that the first evidence we have
for the presence of a person in Plymouth Colony is on the tax
of 25 March 1633. Since most of the passenger ships arrived
in May and June in these years, we assume that anyone appearing
in this tax list must have arrived no later than 1632, and that
year will be given at this point. Thus, in some cases the year
given here will be precise, and in other cases it will be the
latest possible date of arrival; in either case, if no citation
is given here, the year chosen may be deduced from information
given in a later section.
FIRST
RESIDENCE: The evidence on first residence in New England
will usually come from the surviving town or church records,
although it may also be learned from court or literary sources.
In many instances the evidence on first residence will be from
several years after arrival in New England, and so the possibility
remains that the immigrant settled in one place for a short
time without leaving a record, and then moved on to another
settlement. The entry here will simply be based on the best
surviving evidence.
REMOVES:
If the subject of the sketch resided in more than one New England
settlement, that information is given here. When the year of
removal is known or can be deduced, the entry would say, for
example, “Hartford 1635”; in this example, we would probably
not have a record which explicitly stated that the person made
the move in that year, but we would learn from the Cambridge
records that the person had received land grants in 1633 and
1634, but did not appear in the land inventory taken in the
fall of 1635, indicating early removal to Hartford, in advance
of the main party. In many instances we will not be able to
fix the date of migration so precisely, and the entry might
then read “Windsor by 1648,” indicating that the person was
of record in Windsor in that year, but his or her last record
in the prior place of residence was two or more years earlier.
In some cases a family might reside in one of those towns that
subdivided itself early, and so a date of “removal” might be
impossible to determine. In Charlestown, for instance, many
families soon established homes on the opposite side of the
Mystic River from Charlestown proper. When this area was set
off some years later as Malden, it cannot be said that the family
moved, only that the town line had shifted around them. Similar
situations arise with Beverly and Braintree. In these instances
the new town will be included in the list of REMOVES,
but without a date attached.
RETURN
TRIPS: This section encompasses movements in which the sometime
New England resident returned to England temporarily or permanently,
or moved on to a colony outside New England, whether on the
mainland or in the Caribbean.
OCCUPATION:
This heading will frequently be blank, as many of the early
New Englanders left no direct evidence of occupation. In a few
instances when a detailed inventory allows a deduction that
the person was a subsistence farmer, the occupation will be
stated as husbandman. In most instances when no evidence is
available and this section is omitted, we may assume that the
person could be described as yeoman or husbandman.
CHURCH
MEMBERSHIP: When we have direct evidence from surviving
church records of membership in a given church, that knowledge
will appear here. In addition, when church membership can be
deduced from other records, most commonly from admission to
freemanship in Massachusetts Bay after 1 May 1631, that will
be included here as well. For many settlements we have no surviving
church records and no information on church membership. Most
importantly, since no records exist for the early Plymouth church,
and since no minister was settled there for a long period of
time, we will only enter data on membership in Plymouth church
for a few people who are mentioned directly in that context
by Bradford or some other contemporary writer.
FREEMAN:
For some Plymouth Colony men, records of admission to freemanship
were entered in the court minutes. Many freemen were not so
recorded, but lists of freemen were compiled periodically, at
first for the colony as a whole, and then for the entire colony,
but organized town by town. The court records also have some
entries for men who were propounded for freemanship, but not
admitted to that condition. There are also lists of men who
took the oath of fidelity, and that data is also recorded in
this section.
OFFICES:
This section includes both civil service, whether at the town,
county or colony level, and also military service. In most sketches
we attempt to include all discoverable service, with the limitation
that much of the evidence, especially for town offices, remains
in manuscript form, not all of which has been searched. For
those community leaders who held many higher offices, no attempt
has been made here to collect evidence on all lesser offices.
All civil
service will be presented first, usually with separate paragraphs
for each colony, county or town in which service has been found.
All military service will then be grouped at the end of this
section. All able-bodied adult males were expected to serve
in the local train band, and evidence of that service will be
included here; this may amount to nothing more than an entry
for a weapon or two in the probate inventory for that individual.
EDUCATION:
The most direct evidence for education will be for those men,
mostly ministers, who attended one of the universities in England
– Cambridge or Oxford. Our source for these institutions will
be Venn and Foster. Some immigrants also attended a grammar
school in England (preparatory
to university in some cases). Beyond evidence of this sort,
we will rely principally on three other sources to get some
idea of the level of education and literacy reached by a given
immigrant: holding an office that required reading and writing
ability, such as town clerk; ownership of books, usually found
in probate inventories; and ability to sign one’s name.
ESTATE:
Most of the material included under this heading will be from
land and probate records. At this early period much of the evidence
on landholding (not limited to proprietorial grants) is to be
found in town records; since much of this material remains unpublished,
not all records of land transactions for the persons of interest
to us have been included here.
Much of
the evidence for the identities of the children of the immigrants,
and the birth order, will be found here. When more detailed
argumen-tation on these points is needed, it will be found under
COMMENTS.
BIRTH:
When we know the English origin of the immigrant, and have the
baptismal record, that will be entered here, along with the
names of the parents of the immigrant. More frequently, we will
not have this information; nevertheless, in almost all cases,
an attempt will be made to estimate a year of birth for the
immigrant, however crudely. This will be based largely on certain
assumptions about the minimum or average age at which certain
life events occurred: fourteen to witness a document or choose
a guardian; sixteen to become a church member; twenty-one to
become a freeman; twenty-five as the approximate age of first
marriage for most men.
DEATH:
In the absence of a specific record of death, an estimate will
be made based on the appearance of the subject in other records.
This will frequently be based on probate documents, but there
are many other possibilities. In such cases there may be no
direct citation of the relevant documents here, as they will
almost always be cited more directly under some other heading.
MARRIAGE:
For each spouse data on date and place of marriage, when known,
is given, as well as the parents of the spouse, any previous
or later spouses of that spouse, and a date of death.
CHILDREN:
Evidence that allows us to compile a list of children born to
a given couple, and to deduce their birth order, will be found
mostly under ESTATE, COMMENTS, or both.
When we
do not have a specific date of birth of baptism from primary
sources, we attempt to assign an approximate date, in order
to bring the family into better focus. In some cases that date
will be relatively precise, and will be entered as, for example,
“about 1638.” Such a date will generally be derived from an
age at death or an age given in a deposition, but may also be
imposed by our knowledge of the structure of the rest of the
family. An “about” date should be considered to be accurate
within a year or two on either side of the stated year. Dates
that are known less precisely will be entered as, for example,
“say 1638.” These dates may be assigned somewhat arbitrarily,
based on our knowledge of other dates in the family, on birth
order, and on a number of assumptions, including the expectation
of a two-year interval between births (unless the earlier child
died very soon) and the exclusion of multiple births without
specific evidence for such events.
We do not
attempt here to outline the full career of each child. We wish
only to determine whether the child died young, and if not,
whether the child eventually married. Thus, although all known
marriages of the child will usually be given, in some cases
we may only present the first marriage, just to differentiate
this child from others of the same name in other families. We
do not make a special effort to determine the date of death,
although this may be included if it assists in estimating the
year of birth.
ASSOCIATIONS:
Two different types of information may appear here. First, when
the subject of the sketch is related, whether by marriage or
by blood, to some other immigrant to New England prior to 1643,
and when that relationship existed prior to migration, that
information will be shown here. This may simply demonstrate
the influence of kinship on migration, or it may provide clues
for further research in England.
Second, if no such tie to another participant in the Great Migration
is known, this will be the place to point out persistent associations
with other immigrants, which may provide clues to English origins
and group or chain migrations.
COMMENTS:
This section provides an opportunity for discussing any matter
that does not fit neatly into one of the sections described
above. It may include, but is not restricted to, the following:
Specific
records that do not fall into any of the narrowly-defined categories
above, but which are thought to be of interest. The most common
of these will be court appearances, whether in civil or criminal
proceedings.
Various
activities that fall outside the categories of the biographical
section, such as William Aspinwall’s trading and exploratory
expedition up the Delaware River, or the evidence for George
Alcock as a butcher.
Discussion
of errors or discrepancies, whether in primary or secondary
sources. If possible the discrepancy will be corrected; if not,
the arguments in favor of various positions will be presented.
Errors in obscure sources may be ignored, but all problems in
Savage and Pope will be discussed.
Evidence
and arguments for specific genealogical conclusions. In some
cases the records given under the ESTATE section will
be sufficient, without further interpretation, to establish
the list of children. But when this is not the case, further
evidence and argumentation will be given here.
Suggestions
for further research. This will be the case when not all available
records have been searched, or when some likely line of research
suggests itself.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC
NOTE: For some families, there has been sufficient material
published to require separate discussion. This will be the case
especially when a late-nineteenth-century genealogy has been
corrected by more recent articles in the periodical literature,
or when there are two or more published genealogies of greatly
different value. This note will attempt to point out the relative
value of what is in print, in hopes of deterring the continued
reliance on outdated and incorrect claims.
