Blog
Research in New England
Your Ancestor Was Warned Out of Town. That’s Good News.
Imagine finding this in a Massachusetts town’s records: in 1768, the constable was ordered to warn Jonathan and Hannah Pratt and their children to depart the town. It sounds like a scandal. What did they do?
Most likely, nothing at all. New England towns were responsible for supporting their own poor, so newcomers were often formally “warned out” to keep the town from becoming responsible for them if they ever fell on hard times. Many families who were warned out simply stayed. And the record frequently notes something genealogists rarely find elsewhere: where the family came from.
That’s New England research in a nutshell. The region has some of the richest records in America, but getting the most from them means knowing what the records meant at the time, where they ended up, and which ones most researchers never think to check.
“It’s all been done already”… or has it?
New England is famous for its published genealogies, compiled vital records, and scholarly journals. That’s a gift, and a trap. Compiled sources can be wrong, and errors get copied for generations. Research in New England teaches you to use these resources well: surveying the key regional and state compilations, from Connecticut’s Barbour and Hale Collections to Vermont’s Nye Index, while learning to evaluate them critically and trace them back to original records.
Two case studies show this in practice. One re-examines a long-accepted line of descent and untangles similarly named men. The other follows a Connecticut family’s scattered branches to California, with stops as far off as Australia and India.
Know where to look
Colonial borders shifted, towns split, and records followed. The course covers the jurisdictional changes across all six states so you know where records were actually kept. From there, the week goes deep into:
- Town records, including land, taxes, town meetings, warnings out, indentures, and more
- Church records across Congregational, Quaker, Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, Jewish, and other traditions
- Land ownership and transfer from the first proprietors through the 1800s
- Military records from the Pequot War through the War of 1812, including loyalists, women, and people of color
- Vital records in the digital age, and how to get back to the originals
Beyond the usual sources
Some of the best material isn’t where most researchers look. Sessions cover the NEHGS study projects and manuscript collections, Vermont’s manuscript state papers, and specialized repositories such as the American Antiquarian Society. Others follow New Englanders across borders: into Canada, back to England, to the West Indies, and into British colonial records held in London.
The course also examines the lives and records of free and enslaved Black New Englanders in the colonial era, and the research strategies for finding the first settlers of the Great Migration.
Is this course for you?
This course is for experienced genealogists ready to move beyond basic searches and tackle long-standing New England research problems.
Learn from the experts
D. Joshua Taylor leads the course, joined by Scott Andrew Bartley, Diane Florence Gravel, CG, Catherine B. W. Desmarais, CG, and Janice Lovelace, PhD.
Join us
Research in New England runs January 25–29, 2027, as part of the virtual Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy.