Early Connecticut Marriages as Found on Ancient Church Records Prior to 1800

Oceanport, NJ: Digital Editions, 2007. This new edition, published on a USB Flash Drive (credit card style), contains two text files in DOC format (2.1 Mb) for MAC or PC and most current word processing programs: 682 pages of text (marriage records), grouped by county and town, and a new, consolidated index of forty pages.

A classic compendium, originally published in seven volumes, 1897 to 1906, it contains marriage records of various Congregational (and a few Episcopalian) churches in Connecticut. Bailey clearly recognized the importance of transcribing records that were quickly disappearing and making the transcriptions available to genealogical researchers throughout the world. For this, we owe him our gratitude.

However, as originally published – and lately republished verbatim in PDF format by others – the work is extremely difficult to use. The material for each of the seven volumes seems to have been gathered haphazardly and each volume has its own index, which is only vaguely alphabetical.

While scanning and proofing the text of the seven volumes, we decided to produce a new edition to make the job of finding information much easier for researchers. We assembled all the marriage records of the original publication in a single machine-searchable file (682 pages) and reordered the contents to constitute logical chapters (one chapter for each of the state's eight counties). Additionally, we consolidated the seven indexes in a single file (40 pages), and alphabetized it.

Although this new Digital Edition has its own pagination, the volume and page numbers of the original publication are shown in the right margin, bracketed and highlighted.