Published Massachusetts Town Vital Records
Kory L. Meyerink, MLS, AG, FUGA

Since vital records were not consistently kept outside of New England until after the 1850's, printed town birth, marriage and death records are rarely found for other locations. Many other published records (from church, cemetery, newspaper and other sources) are available for most eastern states, but published town vital records are rare outside New England. Of the six New England states, Massachusetts has, by far, the most extensive and comprehensive collection of published vital records. With the advent of Google Books posting a growing number of these previously published books, the following discussion is increasingly relevant. For a handy linked list of the town vital records visit our Massachusetts Vital Records page.

The largest collection of printed town vital records for any state belongs to Massachusetts where a variety of formats and arrangements provide coverage for all but about 20 of the 364 towns and cities in the state. Generally they fall into three groups: periodical articles, typescript transcripts in library collections, and published books. The two major periodicals that have published Massachusetts town records are the Mayflower Descendant and the New England Historical and Genealogical Register. Vital records in these journals are generally published serially over several issues, usually as verbatim transcripts from the town clerk’s records.

While this is a useful service, finding such records can be difficult. Very few sources indicate which towns are published in which volumes, and many libraries do not have a complete run of one or both of these journals. The recent appearance of both of these journals on CD-ROM certainly makes this less of a problem and provides, at the same time, an every-name index to help find references to specific families. In a few cases, these articles have been reprinted as a separate volume.

Many other town records are available in typed transcripts made by earlier researchers and deposited at various libraries. Chief among these are the Rollin H. Cooke collection at the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield, the Corbin collection at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston. Transcripts for a few towns are in the Daughters of the American Revolution Library in Washington, D.C. Fortunately, all of these collections are available on microfilm through the Family History Library and its centers. The vast majority of Massachusetts town records are available as separately published volumes, approximately 200 of which were published between 1902 and the 1920s as part of an “Official Series” underwritten by the state. About 32 other towns have been published outside of the official series (usually at a later date).

For a very useful list of where each town’s vital records are published, see the table in the Massachusetts section of Marcia D. Melnyk's Genealogist's Handbook for New England Research, 4th ed. (Boston, Massachusetts: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1999. The books currently being re-published by Google are part of the Official Series.

It is instructive to examine the Official Series volumes as a model of how not to compile vital records and what to be aware of as similar arrangements are encountered in other volumes. In 1902 the Massachusetts legislature provided for the purchase, by the state, of 500 copies of any printed book with the records of births, marriages, and deaths of any town in the state, upon acceptance by the commissioner of public records and the board of free public library commissioners. These copies were to be distributed free to libraries, public offices, and societies.

Spurred on by the promise of sufficient sales to the state, several societies, notably the New England Historic and Genealogical Society, began publishing town records. However, the acceptable format was determined by the commission and arranges the records alphabetically by surname (under the common spellings) and then given name within three sections: births, deaths, and marriages. This arrangement however destroyed any of the chronological and family arrangement evidence which often was part of the original record.

Eben Putnam analyzed the first forty one volumes and identified another concern, and reported that “this form does not provide for all the information which the records contain.”¹ He then illustrated this concern with several examples comparing the information in the original records with that in the published volume. One of his examples from the Bellingham records follows:

Original records of Bellingham

Putnam continued his commentary:²

“The style of printing these records especially approved by the Commission is to place all the births in one section, by groups of same names (but different spellings of one family name are not brought together), and the given names follow alphabetically according to date. Thus families are divided and in such a way as to lose whatever value there is in the location of the original entry. The eldest children of a man may appear under the Z's and his youngest children under the A's; they may be even under different spellings of the surname. Any record additional to the record of birth, ... is taken away and placed in another section of the book ... The deaths are arranged in the same arbitrary manner. In the case of the marriages the entry appears in fuller extent under the husband but is practically repeated under the woman's name, where a simple cross reference would do. It is needless to state that an ordinary index to family names appended to a literal printed transcript of the records is quite as serviceable and less costly.”

Another of the very great omissions in the Official Series is the omission of references to the page of the original where the entry may be found. Fortunately these records are generally available on microfilm and microfiche, so recourse to the original is easy (and as this discussion shows, necessary). Note that many of the other volumes published separately from the Official Series, usually reproduce the town records in the arrangement and format of the originals, with an every name index included. Thus they correct the most significant of these problems.

This article was adapted by the author from information Kory L. Meyerink, MLS, AG, FUGA, originally wrote for chapter 7, “Vital and Cemetery Records” in Printed Sources: A Guide to Published Genealogical Records (Salt Lake City: Ancestry, 1998) and is used here with permission.

^1. Eben Putnam, "The Genealogical Magazine," Vol.1. No. 1 (April 1905), p. 5.
^2. Ibid., p. 7-8.