Getting Started With English Origins Of New England Families
Most genealogists in New England hit a wall fairly quickly when they try to trace their colonial ancestors back across the Atlantic. The records get sparse, the names get common, and the dates get fuzzy. That is exactly what the English Origins Of New England Families series was built to solve. Donald Lines Jacobus started this project for the American Antiquarian Society, and it has grown into a multi-volume reference set that attempts to link specific New England families back to their places of origin in England. The series is organized by town rather than by family name, which immediately sets it apart from most other genealogical dictionaries. Each entry gives you a short sketch of a family that settled in a particular New England community, and then it provides whatever evidence Jacobus could find to connect that family to a specific parish, county, or region in England. The format is compact. You get birth and death dates, marriage information, children, and then the England connection if one could be established. I spent a couple of years going through these volumes systematically, and the single most useful thing I learned early on is how to read the citations. Jacobus does not give you bibliographies in the modern academic sense. He references his sources inline, usually just a surname with a volume abbreviation. Knowing the standard abbreviations for major collections like the Visitation of Hampshire, the Harleian Society publications, and the various Parish Register Abstracts saves you from having to chase down references you can verify yourself.
The second insight that nobody really tells you upfront is that these entries are not definitive proof. They are working hypotheses. Jacobus was brilliant at reading conflicting evidence, but he also made guesses when the paper trail ran thin. I once spent three weeks tracking an English ancestor that a volume claimed was from Somerset. The problem was that the volume had conflated two different Richard Warren lines that shared a baptism date but came from completely different parishes. The workaround was to go back to the original probate record Jacobus cited, which in this case was a 1635 will at the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. The will clearly showed the correct Somerset parish, and the New England branch I was following was actually from a different Richard entirely.
How To Use The Series Effectively
The books are published in alphabetical order by the New England town, so you need to know which town your ancestor came from before you start. If you have a family from Concord, Massachusetts, you go to the Concord volume. If your ancestor moved around between towns, which was extremely common in seventeenth-century New England, you may need to check multiple volumes. I have found entries for the same family listed under two different towns when they briefly settled elsewhere before relocating permanently. The real value here is in the England-to-America connection. Most online databases will get you to a Plymouth or Boston arrival record and then stop. This series goes further back. It was compiled using English parish registers, visitations, probate records, and land documents that were not easily accessible to American researchers when the first volumes came out in the late 1930s and 1940s. That archival work still matters today. One thing that catches people off guard is the coverage gap. The series covers certain towns heavily and leaves others almost entirely empty. Middlesex County in Massachusetts has extensive entries. Rural areas in Vermont and Maine have very little because those settlements came later and drew from a narrower set of English source families. If your family is from a poorly covered area, you are not going to find much here, and you will need to pivot to other resources like the New England Historical and Genealogical Register articles or the original parish records themselves.
Get the Full Details
The downside that nobody advertises is the price and the physical condition of the books. The original four-volume set is expensive if you buy it new from NEHGS, and the used market is unpredictable. More importantly, many copies from the 1940s and 1950s have brittle pages and fading ink. I have handled copies where the citation footnotes were nearly illegible. Scanned versions help but they do not always preserve the quality of the original microfilm references. If you are doing this research seriously, the practical approach is to start with the NEHGS membership. Members get access to the library in Boston where the complete set is available, and the reference staff is familiar with how to use these volumes. You also get digital access to the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, which contains hundreds of follow-up articles and corrections to entries in the original series. Many of Jacobus's initial claims were refined or corrected in subsequent register publications, sometimes decades later. I found at least four entries in my own research where a later article in the Register superseded what the book said. The other resource worth knowing about is the supplementary publications that came out after the main four volumes. Jacobus and his collaborators published additional entries in various formats over the years, and some of those are scattered across different publishers. The most useful supplement is the one covering the Plymouth Colony families, since the original series did not give that area the same depth of coverage.
What the series cannot do for you is replace the primary English records. It is a finding aid, not a substitute. If an entry says your ancestor likely came from Devonshire based on a circumstantial match of surnames and dates, you still need to verify that in the Devon parish records or the bishop's transcript collection. The series gives you a direction. It does not guarantee you reached the right destination. I also want to be straightforward about the limitations of the England connections themselves. A significant number of entries end with phrases like "perhaps from" or "possibly identified with." Those are honest admissions on Jacobus's part, but they mean you should not treat those links as facts in your family tree. I have seen too many online family trees copy these speculative connections verbatim without any independent verification, and it creates a cascading error problem that gets harder to untangle the deeper you go. For the families that do have solid England connections documented in this series, the evidence is usually stronger than what you find in general genealogy databases. The probate and visitation citations are real documents, and Jacobus had access to them before most of those records were digitized. That historical advantage still holds weight even though more English records are online now than when the series was first compiled.
The best workflow I have found is to use the English Origins Of New England Families volumes to identify potential England parishes, then take those leads to the British Library's catalog or to Ancestry's England collections to see if the primary records support the connection. This combined approach is faster than chasing English records blind and more reliable than accepting the series entries without verification.
