Vital Records of Yarmouth, MA to 1850

In 2007, The Society of Mayflower Descendants in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations granted permission to NEHGS to digitize and present this work. The original was originally published in 1975 and is now out-of-print.

From the introduction:

"Only five percent of the Yarmouth Vital Records have previously appeared in print. In preparing these two volumes, we transcribed the records from microfilm, comparing our first 43 pages with George E. Bowman's transcriptions in the Mayflower Descendant. The Yarmouth town books were destroyed in a fire about 1674. Records of only a few events prior to that date appear in the earliest book, book 3. Records from all town books containing vital records prior to 1850 were copied: books 3, 4, 7, 8, 18, 20, 21 and Register Vol. 1.

Names of persons and places have been copied exactly; other spellings have been modernized, and standard capitalization employed. Marriage intentions have been abstracted, but the word "intentions" or the word "published" is included with each, to avoid confusion with marriage records.

Entries in the Yarmouth record books were made as much as 300 years ago, long before the standardization of spelling. Hence they contain a wide variety of spellings of family names and place names. Some can be recognized by pronouncing them phonetically; others require a fertile imagination to detect resemblance to a known name. In the Index, names are alphabetized under the more popular spelling, followed by typical, but not all, unusual spellings from the records, to guide the searcher. The familiar Cape Cod name of Kelley, for instance, occurs in more than 14 versions including O Kelly, Okelia and Ocely. Elizabeth is spelled in a dozen different ways!

A few items found in the Plymouth Colony Records (MD vols. 13, 15, 16, and 18) which were missing from or incomplete in the town records, have been printed in the Appendix.

A search for families in the Yarmouth area ought also to include the following other sources: West Yarmouth Church Records in the NEHGR vols. 105-109; East Yarmouth Church Records in Genealogical Advertiser vols. 2-4; and Dennis Vital Records partially found in MD vols. 6-8 and 10-13. Although Dennis was not separated from Yarmouth until 1793, Dennis record books contain much early information such as births starting in 1712; many early Dennis VR, but not all, appear in the Yarmouth records."

Because of the ‘creative’ spelling of surnames in the original records, use of the soundex search feature is recommended for this database.

This database contains 12,098 births, 9,858 marriages, and 4,701 deaths.

This volume is also available in our Boston research library, call number: F74.Y2 S47 1975.

To locate additional genealogy and local history resources, search our library catalog.