Charlestown was established about 1630 at the beginning of the Great Migration, and was annexed to Boston in 1874. It is situated in Middlesex County which was created in 1643 when Massachusetts Bay Colony was divided into four shires. Originally Charlestown also included Burlington, Malden, Somerville, Stoneham, Wilmington, Winchester, and Woburn, and parts of Arlington, Cambridge, Medford, and Reading. Its extant records begin in the mid-1630s. This is truly a phenomenal genealogical collection, being probably the most detailed and comprehensive work of its kind. Wyman spent a lifetime collecting and arranging the material for his work, but unfortunately died suddenly of pneumonia shortly before it was published. This work attempts to identify all the residents of Charlestown from its first settlement until about 1818, placing them in a genealogical context. In addition to the genealogies, Wyman provides a concise summary of the real estate transactions which each person was involved in, as culled from the first 139 volumes of Middlesex deeds, Suffolk County deeds, and town records. This collection presents a remarkable synthesis of data from town, church, county, and private records, and belongs in the library of every researcher interested in Massachusetts Bay Colony families. The entries are arranged in a very useful dictionary format.
Thomas Bellows Wyman
(1879), 2002, CD-ROM, Graphic Images, Adobe Acrobat, PC or Mac, 1186 pp.
ISBN: 9780788421808
101-CD2180
