I have just received the last volume in Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs’ Plymouth Colony town records series – see my earlier post on the records of Sandwich and Eastham. The Town Records of Duxbury, Bridgewater, and Dartmouth during the Time of Plymouth Colony, 1620–1692, like Sandwich and Eastham, is published on-demand through Lulu.com. Jeremy also has two other volumes available through Lulu.com: the town records of Marshfield and Plymouth Colony Records. Deeds, &c. vol. II, 1651–1663. I have these latter two on order.

The arrangement of this new volume is identical to that of Sandwich and Eastham, with names indexed to the dates of records in the Records Calendar that includes abstracts from both town and colony sources. The Calendar, in turn, then refers to the page number of the original transcription in the Records Transcriptions section.

This volume is printed in an 8” x 11” format (the same size as Eastham) and has 397 pages, divided by town: Duxbury, 137 pages; Bridgewater, 214; and Dartmouth, 34. Compared to the volumes on Sandwich, which has 463 pages, and Eastham with 480 pages, and with Jeremy’s transcriptions of Scituate town records published by NEHGS in three volumes, it is clear that the extant records for this period of time (1620–1692) for Duxbury, Bridgewater, and Dartmouth are far smaller than the others.

David Alden was paid 10 shillings “for wood,” perhaps to heat the meeting house? “For a wolfe to an Indian” 7 shillings, six pence.

The earliest records for Duxbury (officially established as a town in 1637) were lost when the town clerk’s house burned in 1660. Bridgewater was only established as a town from Duxbury in 1656, and Dartmouth’s records begin in the late 1670s.

These limitations prevent the Duxbury, Bridgewater, and Dartmouth volume from being anyway near as inclusive and interesting (no earmark registries, for example) as the Sandwich and Eastham volumes, but it still presents many land grants, deeds, lot divisions, bounds, and in the case of Bridgewater, vital records, of value for seventeenth-century family research.

Duxbury’s records include a few accounts of what the town paid out for wages and services, which can contain some interesting morsels. In 1680 Rodolphus Thacher was paid 10 shillings for sweeping the meeting house. David Alden was paid 10 shillings “for wood,” perhaps to heat the meeting house? “For a wolfe to an Indian” 7 shillings, six pence. In 1676 Joseph Prior, Jr., was paid one shilling “for mending the pulpit dore.” In 1692 Peter West was paid 15 shillings, 6 pence for serving on the Grand Jury and “mending the meeting house.”

Thanks, Jeremy.