Author: Royal R. Hinman

Publisher:

Published: 2015-08-05

Total Pages: 814

ISBN-13: 9781332311330

Excerpt from A Catalogue of the Names of the Early Puritan Settlers of the Colony of Connecticut: With the Time of Their Arrival in the Country and Colony, Their Standing in Society, Place of Residence, Condition in Life, Where From Business, &C., As Far as Is Found on Record In giving to the public a work like the one I now offer, imperfect as publications of this kind generally must be, and depending upon all kinds of evidence, for proof of early days, such as town, court, probate and church records, often badly written two hundred years since, connected with an orthography, frequently difficult to decipher, and old books, with many obliterated margins, with family records in ancient tattered Bibles, and tombstones with many of the words and figures obliterated by time, journals to which I have referred, with dates culled from odd numbers and broken volumes, may be some excuse for the compiler for such errors as necessarily will occur In works of this kind. I have Only to say to such fault-finders, serve yourselves better by collecting the genealogy and history of your own ancestors in this country. I have frequently been amused when meeting men of intelligence, who were unable to give me the name of their great-grandfather, and many could not even inform me who was their grandfather, where he resided or where he died, or the maiden name of their grandmother. Indeed I found in one case, a gentleman of a liberal education, who was unable to inform me the month in which he was married, or the birth of any of his six children. Too much dependence has been placed upon family tradition, which is generally worse than no evidence. Ask most men what they know of their first ancestors in this country, and seven persons out of eight will honestly answer - "three brothers came over to this country together," and often give their names, when in fact there are not found In the whole colony of Connecticut but four cases, where three brothers came into the colony in the early settlement, except they were children who accompanied their parents. The errors which I committed in the five numbers, I before published, were owing more to my reliance upon family tradition than all other causes. I have devoted the five past years entirely to this subject, and now feel as though I had only commenced a task of twenty years. I have examined some of the records of Long Island, of New Jersey, of Massachusetts, and very many in Connecticut, at an expense of money and time. Several of the first records in the state of New York are in the Dutch language, and in one town in New Jersey, the records have uniformly been kept in Dutch, until since A.D. 1800 - from the latter I glean nothing. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.