Tuesday, November 12, 2013

FREE Rhode Island Resources at Diane Boumenot's Website

Genea-blogger and cousin Diane Boumenot has added a lot of downloadable files to her Free Rhode Island Resources page on her One Rhode Island Family website:


These resources are for town records, town vital records, church records, newspaper records, and more.

One of the sub-pages is for Arnold's Rhode Island Vital Records:


On this page, Diane has managed to find online - for FREE - all 21 volumes of the Rhode Island Vital Records, 1636-1850 series by James Arnold and has listed the sections of each volume with links to download a PDF of each volume.

When a complete set of these books is found in hard cover, it takes a complete shelf at a library!  What a great resource for Rhode Island researchers.

Ancestry.com has a searchable database for this record set also, titled Vital record of Rhode Island, 1636-1850, first series, births, marriages and deaths : a family register for the people.

I've spent several delightful (for me...) hours going page by page through the "Rhode Island Friends Records" finding some of my ancestral families in Volume 7, and citing the volume and page number in my genealogy database.  I have a lot more to look through.

Here's the first page of Volume 7:


Of the 7 marriages listed on the screen above, 3 of them are for my ancestors!  There was a lot more in Marriages, Births and Deaths, including items for several Massachusetts towns.

If you have colonial Rhode Island ancestry, then you should have this set of digital books in your computer file folders.  I have a special place for it in my Genealogy file folder under Localities>Rhode Island>Arnolds Rhode Island VRs 1636-1850. I also made a PDF of Diane's page of the contents of the Vital Records volumes and saved it there.

My thanks to Diane for finding these excellent resources and making them available to the genealogy world in one place.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/11/free-rhode-island-resources-at-diane.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver




1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks Randy! Fun seeing my page here. Glad I noticed it in the dashboard of my blog, because I would have been pretty surprised to find this in my email inbox when your posts arrive tomorrow morning!!
Thanks for also pointing out the church-oriented sections of Arnold's Vital Records; people think of place names and often miss those.
Keep us posted on your Rhode Island ancestors!
Diane