Pope has entries for more than five thousand persons found in the records of Plymouth Colony and Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1620 and 1650. The author follows each resident of these colonies until death, utilizing many sources not employed by Savage and others who had covered the same period.
Pope squeezes into his entries information from ship passenger lists, lists of freemen, church records, town records, deeds and wills. Of especial importance, the author included data from the Massachusetts Archives papers, from the Middlesex County Court Files and from the notarial records of Thomas Lechford and William Aspinwall, sources not mined by previous compilers of similar compendia.
This source provides a comprehensive survey of the early decades of two New England colonies, and must be consulted by all researchers working in this time and place.
