John Austin has compiled accounts of more than 460 families who settled in Rhode Island during the seventeenth century, tracing
some of the families to the third generation and others to the fourth, including both male and female lines. These accounts include extensive extracts from original sources.
Among the original source material, Austin placed special emphasis on probate records, with full abstracts of the wills and inventories of many first, second and third generation settlers. He made a special effort to summarize the officeholding of each settler, and also included information on land transactions and religious affiliations.
More than 90 of the accounts are taken to the birth of the fourth generation. The families so treated are generally the earliest settlers, and include most of the early religious and civic leaders of the colony. For most sketches, whether of three generations or four, the members of the final generation listed were born from about the 1690s to the 1730s.
Some of the accounts include information on the European origins of the settlers, and, where pertinent, on earlier residence
in Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The CD includes high-quality images of every page as originally published (not just a transcript) and is fully searchable
using Adobe Acrobat Reader (version 4 or later recommended) on any Windows, Macintosh, or Unix computer. The data on this CD is completely self-contained, and requires no installation.
