As a genealogist, I have often suffered the frustration of being unable to locate a record of an ancestor’s birth, marriage or death in the notoriously inconsistent records of early New England. So it was with some sympathy that I read recently of a request from a genealogical researcher from Maine to find a record of the death of Robert Morgan, one of the founders of First Parish. I spent several hours scrutinizing the first volume of our Parish Records for references to Robert Morgan and his family, and found some fascinating information that I thought I would share with other Parishioners.
The original record book, kept by Rev. John Hale, is under lock and key, but we have both a Xerox copy of it made in the 1970s and a printed transcription made by William B. Upham for the Essex Institute (now the Philips Library) in 1905. Robert’s name [...]