The Mayflower Families Silver Books Index is here!
by Bonnie Wade Mucia, Silver Books Project Director
The Silver Books Project started in 1959, with the first Mayflower Families volume published in 1975. Since then, multiple volumes have been published. Forty-one books are still in use, each with its own Index. The only way to check if someone was named in numerous volumes was to look in each book separately.
For decades, the Mayflower Families Silver Books have provided genealogical scholarship on colonial families. The research extends to migration throughout New England and the United States. Often, colonial families intermarried with other Mayflower passenger families. Mayflower descendants don’t have a family tree – it’s more like creeping Ivy! It is not uncommon for someone to be descended from multiple Mayflower passengers.
When I first became the Silver Books Director in 2020, I wondered if we could somehow create one Index of all the currently used indices to make research easier. Genealogists, Mayflower Historians, and Verifiers at the Mayflower Society use these books daily to research colonial lines. A tool like this is handy when looking for a person in the entire set of books. I completely underestimated the time it would take to put this set together. We had to type every Index into a large Excel spreadsheet, resulting in over 226,000 names. Next came the hard part – combining the names into one. The problem was that these books were compiled over 60 years, and each author had their own idea of how they should be formatted. Take the name, Merrick, for example. It’s a well-known colonial New England name.
It was spelled twelve different ways in all the indices:
Merick/Merrick/Marick/
Mayrick/Merick/Meyrick/
Mirck/Mireck/Mirick/
Mirrick/Myrick/ Myrrrick.
There might be one spelling in one book and two or five spellings in other books, all listed differently. Merrick might be listed 35 different ways in the other indices. And this is only ONE example. Multiply that by thousands of examples. We had NO clue what we were in for and how long it took to combine them into a usable Index. We now have a template of names, and the future Silver Books will all be indexed the same way.
The other surprising thing was the length of the Index. It’s almost 2000 pages! I envisioned one book when starting this project, but in true Silver Books fashion, I was unaware of the magnitude of that undertaking. When they decided to do this project in 1959, from what I can glean from articles and reports on the project's early beginnings, they thought they would have four or five volumes of five generations of descendants of all the Mayflower passengers. Boy, were they off, and so was I! As we started this indexing project, we were surprised by the volume of different names we had. We had to split into three books due to the size.
After almost two years of compiling and editing, the new Mayflower Families Silver Books Index [MFSB Index] is complete. The MFSB Index is a three-part set containing the combined indices of all forty-one Mayflower Families Silver Books. The Index now shows the individual names and which book or books they appear in, which helps in researching names quickly. This new resource will be helpful for those working not only on Mayflower lineage but also on any colonial New England research, as these families are so intertwined. The MFSB Index is a game changer and a must-have for colonial research.
The MFSB Index is dedicated to Jane Fletcher Fiske, FASG the long-time team member who indexed a number of the Silver Books. Jane recently retired from the Silver Book Project and this seemed like a perfect way to thank her for her years of service and all of her contributions in the genealogy community. Thank you Jane!
Also big shout out and THANK YOU to my Silver Book Project team members who worked on this endeavor, but especially to Hilary Swanson, the Silver Books Editor, who was my right-hand person on this project. I couldn’t have done this without you! We spent countless hours editing this publication and then on the phone going over and over minutia, talking about the details of it all. I certainly recognize many colonial New England names at a glance now and think Hilary would agree. Hilary – the sun is shining, and the TANK IS CLEAN! [Inside joke]
You can buy the complete set of the MFSB Index on the GSMD website:
You get a significant discount if you want to buy the complete set of all the Silver Books (not just the Index but all the other individual books) in one shot! You can email sales@themayflowersociety.org to inquire about purchasing the entire collection.
And if you want to know what each Silver Book covers, there is a downloadable PDF guide on the Silver Books:
I will be at RootsTech 2024 so if you want to ask me a question about the Silver Books please feel free! I really hope you enjoy working with the MFSB Index as much as I do.
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