The Ancestry of Hattie E. J. Bruce, 1992

In 1992 I collected my data together and published a book, partly as family Christmas presents, partly to share my information with other researchers. A small run of 50 copies was made with some copies going to libraries such as the New England Historic Genealogical Society, the Westborough, MA and Brattleboro, VT public libraries, the Family History Library, among others.

The book is broken down into several sections:

Forward - describing layout, Julian/Gregorian dates, Colonial money, etc.

Charts - standard tree as well as Ahnentafel (as each has its strengths)

Proven Families - Families for which solid evidence is at hand. These same families can be found on my web site

Probable Families - Families in lines which have not (yet) be solidly linked

Overseas Families - ancestors of immigrants. They are separated from other families due to the fact that records from that long ago and that inaccessible are harder to verify. It's also a good group to set off separately.

A chapter on the person the book starts with (note: this book is "The Ancestry of ..." my grandmother). Included here is a short list of famous "cousins" - others with common ancestors. It has turned out to be one of the sections people have talked about the most ... like my sister, the die-hard Democrat, when she found out she was related to Richard Nixon! Also a chart, broken down by country/county/town giving all ancestors who lived in each town and during what years. This chart was more to help my research. I could quickly find whom I should look for when in a town's records.

Probate records - I originally got hold of wills and inventories of my ancestors in order to connect one generation to the next. What I found, however, was that there is some very interesting personal info in these records and thus included it for the reader. It's a lot of work though, so not everyone would care to type it in.

Index - Covering all persons in the previous sections

The families are arranged within their chapters alphabetically. Within each family, I start with the earliest known ancestor, followed by his son, etc. until reaching a female ancestor. That ends the family as the name changes with her marriage, and the line can be picked up with her husband's family. Each ancestor has several paragraphs. The first is vitals of the ancestor couple (names in bold caps). Following paragraphs give details about their lives. I attempted to provide bits of local and or contemporaneous history, example: describing battles the ancestor was in and how the situation developed into war; also: a 17th century first-hand account of an Indian raid in which my ancestor was killed. Each bit of info is tagged with its source, source references follow the last paragraph of info. References are a MUST for many reasons. The last section under a couple is the list of their children. The ancestor child is in bold.

For this style of family info presentation I followed an example from "The Warner-Harrington Ancestry" by Frederick Warner, 1949. I found it worked quite well for me.

Unfortunately I haven't had the time to convert all of the sections in the book to HTML and thus just the proven ancestors section is up on my web site. Someday I'd like to add the others, but I don't yet have plans for that as there are other things I'd like to get up first, such as grandchildren of my ancestors and possibly JPEG images of ancestors and their homes and grave stones.

If you are interested in seeing a copy of the book, please look for it at one of the libraries mentioned above. Unfortunately I have no more copies that I can part with, but the NEHGS should have a copy in their lending library.