Old Tobe Some Lines Of Descent Of Tobias Saunders Of Westerly Rhode Island 334p

Working With Saunders Family Genealogies From Colonial Rhode Island

I spent about three weeks last fall trying to verify a branch of the Saunders line that claimed descent from Tobias Saunders of Westerly, Rhode Island. The primary source I kept running into was a publication titled Some Lines Of Descent Of Tobias Saunders Of Westerly Rhode Island, sometimes catalogued under slightly different titles depending on which library system you search. It is 334 pages of dense genealogical data, mostly compiled from church records, probate files, and town meeting minutes from the late 1600s through the early 1700s. The book itself is not particularly easy to navigate. There is no index that actually works the way you would expect. The descent lines are presented in a modified register format, which means each generation gets a block of entries rather than a clear tree diagram. You have to read through several pages to understand the relationship between siblings, parents, and children. The compiler used abbreviations that are consistent within the text but obscure if you have never seen colonial Rhode Island notation before. Terms like "m." for married, "d." for died, and occasional use of Latin abbreviations like "fil." for filius will slow you down if you are not already familiar with them. I ran into a specific problem when trying to confirm whether one particular Tobias Saunders was the same person listed in two different generations. The book lists multiple men named Tobias across the decades, and the birth years overlap in ways that make it easy to conflate them. I spent about four hours cross-referencing the Westerly land records at the Rhode Island State Archives before I realized the compiler had made an error in one entry, listing a son as born in 1698 when the probate record actually placed his birth closer to 1703. The workaround was simple enough once I found it: I pulled the original warranteed deed records from Newport County and compared the witness signatures across five documents spanning 1700 to 1715. The man listed as the younger Tobias never appeared as a witness until after 1710, which confirmed he was the son, not the father.

One thing beginners miss about this kind of colonial genealogy work is that the compiler's sourcing is generally sound but not exhaustive. The Saunders family intermarried with several other prominent Rhode Island families, including the Hopkins and Brown lines, and the compiler occasionally relied on secondhand family tradition when primary records were unavailable. If you are building a pedigree and the Saunders line connects to another well-documented family, check that family's genealogies separately. You will often find the same person mentioned with slightly different dates or details that resolve apparent contradictions in the Saunders text. The other counter-intuitive insight is that the 334-page volume contains more useful information in its supplementary notes and appendices than in the main descent tables. The compiler included transcriptions of several wills and land transfers that are not directly tied to a specific descent line but provide context for dates and relationships. One appendix contains a list of Saunders property transactions in Westerly between 1670 and 1720. That list alone saved me probably a dozen hours of archive research. There are real limitations to this resource. The book was compiled decades ago, and several of the primary sources it cited have since been misfiled or lost. The Rhode Island State Archives underwent a reorganization in the early 2000s, and some probate packets referenced in the footnotes no longer carry the same call numbers. If you plan to verify anything from the book, expect to spend time with the current archival inventory systems rather than relying on the citation format exactly as printed. It usually takes about twenty minutes per citation to locate a document in the modern system, compared to what the compiler likely needed in their own research environment.

Availability is another practical concern. The original printing is out of print and runs typically sell for forty to eighty dollars on the secondary market. The Internet Archive has a scanned copy, but the quality varies by page. Some of the earlier pages with handwritten marginalia are difficult to read in the digital version. If you are doing serious research on this line, I would recommend finding a physical copy through a library interloan or visiting a research library that holds the volume. The New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston has a copy, and so does the Rhode Island Historical Society. Both allow on-site consultation without requiring membership for that purpose. If your Saunders connection goes beyond what this volume covers, you will need to look at broader Rhode Island genealogical resources. The American Antiquarian Society holds additional Saunders family papers that are not referenced in the book. The Westerly town clerk's office also retains original record books that predate the compiler's research, and these sometimes contain entries that contradict the published genealogy. I have seen this happen with other families in the region, and it is worth checking the original town records if you are working on a claim that involves inheritance, land disputes, or legal disputes in the Saunders line.