THE GENERAL SOCIETY OF MAYFLOWER DESCENDANTS : SILVER BOOK PROJECT

https://themayflowersociety.org/ featuring genealogy tips, and much more.... Have you heard you're a Mayflower passenger descendant. Is this the time to find out for sure?

SILVER BOOK PROJECT


Excerpt: Today, there are twenty-two volumes of the Silver Books with multiple parts that make up the forty-two book catalog. Volumes One, Two, and Five have been superseded and are no longer in print. The Mayflower Society publishes all the Silver Books which are for sale in the The Mayflower Society store and on the website. The fifth generation is digitized, indexed, and available on the New England Historic Genealogical Society website in a database called Mayflower Families Fifth Generation Descendants, 1700-1880.The Silver Books Project team consists of researchers, reviewers, and editors. They are skilled genealogists and writers that analyze complex genealogical problems and time periods where various records may or may not be available. When vital records aren’t available, other sources are used to link the generations together.

There are various volumes being revised and updated at any given point. The goal is to publish research on all families through generation seven, naming generation eight. Some volumes have not been updated for decades, but we plan to address every family. It takes many hours of research to complete a book, often years in the making.

For an idea imagined in 1959, the project is still going strong with more and more books added every year. Little did they know they were creating one of the crowning jewels of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants. It’s a privilege to be a small part of this decades-old endeavor.

AMERICAN ANCESTORS DATABASES of THE NEW ENGLAND HISTORIC GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY

I do use other databases besides Ancestry TM and FamilySearch.  One of these is called American Ancestors.  Their website includes links to hire a pro.

Excerpt: We offer more than 470 record-based databases to search, containing data from all over the globe. Unique datasets include the Boston Catholic records, the General Society of Mayflower Descendants Applications, and many more.

According to my library, they have access to over 3000 searchable collections.

What I check them for mostly is Irish research especially as those include Boston Roman Catholics.

Years ago there were various start ups and some of those remain on the Internet or grew via volunteers and it seems that Ancestry TM and FamilySearch are the ones have grown the most.  So sometimes the difference is indexing.

There have been times where I checked more than one of the genealogy databases to find people on the census and indexing made all the difference.

FILBYS PASSENGER LISTS - STILL GOOD - STILL AVAILABLE ALWAYS ADDED TO! BUT NOT FINDABLE ON ANCESTRY TM DATABASES BY THAT NAME

Before there were databases that attached to original ship manifests... there was FILBY's.  Well Filby's still exists. Covering immigrants to the U.S. and Canada, the 1500's forwards to the 1970's, every calendar year it's supplemented with more information. Many big city libraries, colleges, and genealogy specialty archives, have the entire binder set, a vast number of volumes. 

Filby's best use is for finding those who came before the 1820's, before there was any lawful requirement that such records be kept. The immigrants on sail ships trickled in well before the steamship era, sometimes just a few at a time on a ship intended to transport cargo. Information in these books comes from a variety of first resources including family diaries, naturalization documents, even indentured servant lists.  An important source was also the passenger lists that were published in newspapers.

The places referenced do not always equate to a port or port city. The place might be a destination city or the first place the person appeared in a public record.

The information in Filby's can and should be cross referenced with other documents.  For instance, I would attempt to cross reference based on lists for Philadelphia or Boston of incoming passengers.

Primarily, it is a way for people with ancestors who arrived in the United States, the colonies, and territories, to move to finding the location they left and potentially records held in other countries.

However, I recently went looking for some German immigrants who came to Pennsylvania some time between 1795 and 1820, most likely closer to the 1820.

The person I sought did not come up on Ancestry TM, the popular database in a general search.  So I headed to Los Angeles, the Central Library in downtown LA, where there is a genealogy and history floor. The Filby's book set there was not entirely complete or undated and the wonderful and earnest genealogy librarian there said to me "Filbys is on Ancestry TM now." We went onto Ancestry TM from there, and using the card catalog (which is confusingly called New Collections on the main page of Ancestry TM) and tried again. No - Searching for Filbys did not bring it up.  But there are numerous other databases that bring up early America arrivals on sail ships.  I individually searched through these and up came a few names.

C 2023 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy  BlogSpot

ROYAL and AMERICAN ANCESTRY OF MEGHAN MARKLE? JUST HOW GENETICALLY RELATED ARE WE TO SOMEONE WHO LIVED 700+ YEARS AGO?

AMERICAN ANCESTORS ORG ; MEGHAN MARKLE ROYAL and OTHER ANCESTORS 

There are no charts showing the connections, but this article from the New England Historical Genealogical Society, is based on Meghan's father's heritage, which connects importantly to one specific immigrant to early Boston who descended from King Edward III (who died in 1377.) For Anglophiles, the connection to aristocracy that the Duchess of Sussex has will especially impress. More so, this article is about (GENEALOGICAL) PYRAMID COLLAPSE, which is, that the further you go back, the more chances there are that you will find familial connections with the same persons on more than one line. Among royal houses, this seems to be especially common since there were arranged marriages that kept them in land and property and aligned with allegiances.

The population was smaller. People tended to marry local or within their class or status. Earlier death often meant earlier marriage and quick remarriage, step and half siblings. And sometimes a person might just have had the genes or transmitted the genes to withstand so much that killed off most people. We find someone who had many children who lived to also spawn. For instance, among the Mayflower descendents, one particular passenger has the very most.

But I want to see the charts, the straight connections, because if we include cousins and other relations, probably every one of us is "related" to someone famous or who succeeded well in life, or someone infamous who failed.

The mysteries of DNA are being revealed bit by bit, but since we know that we are a combination of genes transmitted from both sides of our family, that each generation is a different combination of genes, that genes mutate, a genetic heritage that is documented back 700+ years or so may well have little to nothing to do with us.

Not responsible for what our ancestors did or did not do, so we can't take credit, but we can come to understand them and their lives and their times better, and reflect on how that has influenced us.  What choices did they have?  What choices do we have?

C 2023 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot