Early Vital Records of Sheffield, Mass

From the Introduction to the typescript:

“The earliest Town Record book of Sheffield is a well-preserved volume, although on some pages the ink is fading and the edges of the sheets are somewhat worn. The book has been rebound and the pages covered with silk.

Beginning in the front of the book there is one page with a record of earmarks for cattle, then two pages of an incomplete index, and then the pages containing the vital records. These are numbered from 1a to 154 (although there appears to have been a mistake in the paging and several numbers in the page series are missing).

Reversing the book and beginning again from the back, there are first several more pages with earmarks for cattle, then the long series of pages containing the minutes of the Town Meetings (beginning with the notice to the Constable to call the first meeting dated January 11, 1733 and continuing through the meeting dated December 30, 1776), then a number of pages of Highway surveys, then several pages of records of stray animals taken up, and then several more pages of highway surveys.

In the vital record section of the book it was evidently the clerks intention to allot a page to each family, entering at the top of the page the marriage record of the parents, to be followed below by the birth records of the children as they occurred. As time went on, however, it became necessary to insert the records of new families on some of the, pages, and sometimes even in the case of a single family the record is carried over to a later page.

In this particular page-by-page copy of these records there are given all the Vital records contained in this first volume of Sheffield Records. Although all the names and dates are as given in the record book, some abbreviation of wording has seemed advisable. In the book a marriage record is usually given in this form:

‘August 10: 1736. Then John Smith and Mary Jones were Lawfully Joyned together In Marriage’.

A birth is usually recorded in this manner:

‘James Smith, Son of John Smith and that which his wife Mary bore to him was born May 19, 1737’.

In the case of several families where the marriage had occurred before the parents came to Sheffield there is no marriage record and the family record begins at the top of the page with the birth of a child.

(There are a few cases of illegitimate birth records in which the word wife is omitted and the full name of the mother given). In the death records even of adults the name of the father and mother are usually given.”

While the record dates range from 1690 to 1813, the majority of records are for the period 1724-1788. The database contains records of 1,313 births, 370 marriages, and 164 deaths. Images of the original typescript pages may be viewed from the search results page.

The original typescript is part of the R. Stanton Avery manuscript collection at our Boston research library, call number: MSS A 5932.

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