Genealogical Dictionary Of The First Settlers Of New England

Working With the TRUMBULL: What It Actually Gets You

The Genealogical Dictionary Of The First Settlers Of New England is a reference work compiled by James Hammond Trumbull and published in four volumes between 1869 and 1871, with a later five-volume edition including supplements. It lists colonial-era residents of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, organized town by town with brief entries for each person. The standard scope cutoff is those who settled before May 1692. That is it. No commentary, no analysis, no narrative beyond what the original records provided and what Trumbull chose to include. Most beginners grab it off a shelf, open to a random page, and start reading names. That approach wastes a lot of time. Here is the faster method that actually works in practice. First, find the town where your ancestor appears in later records. Look up that town's entry in the dictionary. The entries are alphabetical by given name within each town. If you are unsure of the first name, you can still scan the town section. Each entry contains the person's name, towns of residence, dates when available, spouses, children, and occasionally a note about their origin or military service.

The trick is knowing what the entry does not contain. It rarely lists every child. It rarely lists sources. It rarely corrects errors found in the underlying records. You will encounter entries where the dates are slightly wrong, where two people with the same name have been collapsed into one entry, and where a settlement location is incorrect because the original record was misread. I ran into this myself when researching a family in Wethersfield, Connecticut. The dictionary listed a man named Samuel Brown as having only three children, but the actual court and probate records from Hartford County show he had at least six. The entry credited him as a son of Richard Brown, but cross-referencing with earlier land deeds revealed a different father. I eventually identified the correct lineage by pulling the Hartford County probate files and matching the dower assignments to the children listed there. The dictionary gave me a starting point, not an answer. Second, treat every date as approximate unless you can verify it elsewhere. Trumbull worked from whatever printed sources, family histories, and personal correspondence were available in the late nineteenth century. He did not go back to the original deeds, court records, or church registers in most cases. That means a birth date of "about 1630" might actually be 1627, and an entry stating someone died "1685" could be a death year that was recorded incorrectly in the source he used. Third, use the index if you need it. The four-volume set has an alphabetical index at the end of the last volume. It covers all four states, not just the town-by-town sections. If you know the name but not the town, search the index first. The index can be unreliable for common names. A search for "John Adams" will return dozens of hits across multiple towns with no way to distinguish which John Adams is yours without additional context.

Fourth, check for supplement volumes. Trumbull published a supplement, and the New England Historic Genealogical Society released additional material over the years. These supplements fill some gaps but introduce new inconsistencies. Do not assume the supplement is more accurate than the original volumes. It is not necessarily better. It is just different, and sometimes it repeats errors from the first edition.

What the Work Does Not Do for You

It does not connect generations. It does not prove relationships. It does not resolve conflicting dates. It does not tell you where a person migrated from before coming to New England, unless that information happened to be in a published source Trumbull had access to. It is an index with annotations, not a genealogy in itself. One thing many people miss is that the dictionary excludes towns that did not exist as formal entities by 1692. Settlements that were later incorporated, plantation lands, and frontier areas often appear under the name of the parent town or not at all. If your ancestor lived in an area that was later split off into a new town, the entry may be filed under the older, larger municipality. I spent weeks looking for a family in what is now part of Vermont, only to realize the records were indexed under a Massachusetts or Connecticut town because the boundary had not been established yet. The dictionary reflects the political geography of the seventeenth century, not the modern one. Another limitation is the treatment of women. The entries are primarily focused on male heads of household. Spouses are listed by name, but their origins, families, and prior marriages are almost never detailed. Children are listed, but daughters often receive only a name and marriage date. If you are researching a woman's lineage through her father or husband, this book will give you a skeleton, not a body. You will need to go to probate records, church registers, and town meetings for anything substantial.

Where to Access It

The work is in the public domain. You can find it freely available through the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and the New England Historic Genealogical Society website. The NEHGS has digitized their copies and makes them searchable. You can also find individual volumes on Google Books. A physical copy is still useful if you prefer turning pages rather than scrolling, but the digital versions are perfectly adequate for research purposes. For the complete five-volume set with supplements, the NEHGS library holds the definitive edition. If you are doing serious colonial research, getting a membership or visiting their library in Boston gives you access to materials that go well beyond what the dictionary alone provides. The dictionary is a starting point. Everything else requires primary sources.

Common Mistakes People Make

The biggest mistake is treating the dictionary as proof. It is not proof. It is a compiled secondary source that summarizes information found elsewhere. If you cite it in a family tree without backing it up with the original record, you are building on sand. Another mistake is assuming that because someone appears in the dictionary, they were a "first settler." The title says first settlers, but the actual criteria are looser. Anyone who resided in the listed towns before 1692 gets an entry, regardless of whether they were the first person there. A man who moved into a town in 1688 gets the same treatment as a man who arrived in 1635. A third mistake is ignoring the abbreviations and shorthand Trumbull used. He relied on standard genealogical abbreviations of his time, some of which are obscure today. "m." means married. "d." means died. "b." means born. But he also used abbreviations for offices, military ranks, and legal terms that vary from entry to entry. When you see something like "lt." or "capt." next to a name, it refers to a military rank held at some point, not necessarily a continuous career. These details matter when you are trying to place a person in a specific historical context. The dictionary remains one of the most useful tools for early New England genealogy, but it is a tool, not a destination. Use it to narrow your search. Verify what it says. And keep looking past it until you find the original document that actually supports the claim you are making.