Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Searching the Mayflower Families Fifth Generation Descendants Collection on AmericanAncestors

The New England Historic Genealogical Society recently released a new compiled record collection - the Mayflower Families Fifth Generation Descendants, 1700-1880 - on the AmericanAncestors.org websites for subscribers to the society.   The news release was published at   http://www.genealogyblog.com/?p=41398.

What is important to know is that these are extracted pages from 31 volumes of published books in the Mayflower Families (the "Silver books") series for 20 Mayflower passengers.  The Silver books provide information for up to five generations from the Mayflower passengers.

The index for this database, and the extracted pages, are ONLY for the fifth generation descendants of the Mayflower passengers in the listed books.  The information does not include information about the first four generations of the passengers families.

I have a number of Mayflower passengers in my family tree, and have used several of the Silver books in my research because they are well researched and are used to determine eligibility for membership in the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, a lineage society.

However, I have not read every Silver book, and want to see if there is information about Seaver/Sever persons in the book.  So I searched for the "Seaver" surname in the Advanced Search form on the AmericanAncestors website.  I limited the search to the "Genealogies, Biographies, Heraldry and Local Histories" in the Catalog field and the "Mayflower Families Fifth Generation Descendants" in the Database field:


I clicked "Search" and limited the matches to the exact surname spelling, and saw 24 matches:


Each match lists an event, event date and event place, plus the Volume and page number of the match.  Clicking on the name takes the user to the extracted page summary.

Down the list, I found a result for Samuel Seaver in the John Alden book:


The page summary image above shows more information about the search result, plus has a larger-than-thumbnail (but unreadable) image.  When I clicked the blue "View" button on the thumbnail page image, the page image appeared:


I can download or print this page for my files.

There is information on this page that I don't have for this Samuel Seaver, who is not the descendant of John Alden; he is the spouse of Hannah Faxon who is the second great-granddaughter of John Alden.

I also noted, in the footnotes, that one of the Sources is:

Unfortunately, my Genealogy.com website page (https://www.genealogy.com/users/s/e/a/RandySeaver/File/0033page.html) was eliminated by Ancestry.com several years ago.

Information about Samuel Seaver's family can be found in my e-book The Descendants of Joshua Seaver (1641-1730) on Scribd, which can be read, or downloaded, for free.

If you have Mayflower ancestors, you may want to check out this collection on AmericanAncestors to see if you have the information they have about your ancestors.

If you think you might have Mayflower ancestors, then search the collection for your known ancestors in the 1700 to 1800 time frame - your ancestor, and you, may be a Mayflower passenger descendant.  If they are in this collection, then go find the Silver book of interest, at a library or buy the book, for the proven ancestors of your ancestor.

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The URL for this post is:  https://www.geneamusings.com/2018/06/searching-mayflower-families-fifth.html

Copyright (c) 2018, Randall J. Seaver

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