It's incredible that this genealogical reference work is still indispensable after 70 years. I've often thought of updating it, but wouldn't know where to begin. What would be the methodology to make sure you got all the recent research (1939 to date) on these families? One of the problems, however, with our genealogical scholarly forebears was their lack of imagination in compiling these works.
This work is given in dictionary form, alphabetical by family name. It is unindexed. There are some cross references between families, but there is no way to know if a certain name appears in more than one place without completely reading the book. One of the great things Robert Charles Anderson did in his Great Migration Series was to include a given name index as well as a surname index. If the GDMNH had a given name index for women, I could use that to see all the available Lydias that might be the wife of Joshua Cromwell (see my previous post). The best I can do is know that Joshua was in Dover and use the 1677 Dover Tax List for all the families and look them up individually. And I'm way too lazy for that. I need to get more desperate before I tackle that option.
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