Even a hundred and forty years after publication, Savage’s four-volume set remains the starting point for most research problems in seventeenth-century New England. Savage applied his acute analytical skills to every family that he could find in the first, second and third generations of settlement.
Savage scoured every record available to him in the Boston area, and
corresponded copiously with historians and genealogists all over New England in
an attempt to make his compendium as complete as possible. Some correspondents
were less diligent than others, so the coverage in the areas away from eastern
Massachusetts can be spotty. Nevertheless, no other single source covers the
first century of New England settlement so broadly.
Savage has been superseded in a limited portion of his range by the Great
Migration Study Project, but that effort has at this date covered somewhat less
than half of the immigrant generation, and will never cover the second and third
generations in the way that Savage did.
Savage was in some ways a precursor to the Jacobus generation of genealogists,
exploding myths with great gusto, and taking care not to confuse and combine in
one sketch records that belong to two or more men. His sketches are often
relieved by his personal comments, stemming from his Victorian political and
religious sensibilities.
