A series of biographical-genealogical monographs on the ancestors of Reverend Henry Whitfield (1590-1657) and his wife Dorothy Sheafe (159?-1669) who left England to help found the town of Guilford, Connecticut in 1639.
Reprinted in these three volumes are seventeen books that comprise one of the major achievements of twentieth-century genealogy--the multi-ancestor compendium compiled and published by Walter Goodwin Davis between 1916 and 1963. These 2,100 fully-indexed pages 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 in Massachusetts; twenty-nine are associated largely with Maine; and eighteen--Basford, Brown, Clifford, Cram, Estow, Fernald, Folsom, Gibbons, Gilman, Marston, Moses, 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 in Essex County, a few in Middlesex or Plymouth counties, or in Boston.
"This book is a basic tool both for genealogists and for historians. Those whose work focuses on seventeenth-century New England will wonder how they managed without it.'