This volume contains nearly three centuries of the history of the First Church of Roxbury, Massachusetts, and its meeting houses, and is replete with biographical sketches of the ministers of the church, the deacons, ruling elders and other church officers, and hundreds of the members of the church.
The author has chosen to arrange this history around the five buildings that have served as meeting houses. For each of these buildings, he lists the ministers and church officers. This list is followed by a history of the church and its meetinghouse for that time period, with extensive extracts from the church and colony records.
Next under each meeting house come the biographical sketches of the ministers, the ruling elders, the deacons, and lesser church officers. Finally, for each meeting house we are given the list of church members in chronological order, with the date of admission to the church where known.
For the first meeting house, under Thomas Weld, John Eliot and Samuel Danforth, the list of church members is taken from the records maintained by Eliot and Danforth. These ministers themselves appended biographical and genealogical information to the entries for most of the members, and the author of this volume has added even more such data where he could. Many of the church admission entries for the later meeting houses are also annotated with substantial personal information.
