Seversmith's Colonial Families

A useful work for New York research (and Long Island in particular) is Herbert Furman Seversmith, Colonial Families of Long Island, New York and Connecticut (5 vols., 1939-58, Washington, D.C., privately printed) and two related reels of microfilm. The author (born Herbert Francis Smith) attempted to trace all his ancestors and genealogies of at least the first few generations of each family. Since many of these families previously had little or no worthwhile material compiled on them, his work is valuable—but often only for clues, since his documentation was minimal, even though he was a skilled genealogist and an early Fellow of The American Society of Genealogists.

The first four volumes cover the family of Nicholas Smith of Milford, Conn. and Huntington, L.I. (the author's male line), followed by the families Ackerly through Ludlam. In volume 5 (of which only book 1 was published) the English ancestry of Roger Ludlow is treated. His notes on the families Lum through Youngs are on the two reels of microfilm. Only a limited number of copies of volumes 1-5 were produced, but it is available on microfilm from the Family History Library (#525,304-06, also #569,822; the two reels of notes are #569,823-24). Not every copy of the volumes is identical since the author revised some pages and even deleted a few families he later determined he was not descended from. His original notes and related correspondence are at the East Hampton Free Library.

Given below is a list of the families treated in this work. Those in volumes 1-3 are also in "My Own Index" in Donald Lines Jacobus, Index to Genealogical Periodicals (3 vols., 1932-53, repr. as 1 vol., 1973). There is an every-name index to volume 1 in The Long Island Division of the Queensborough Public Library, and Mrs. Hester Halstead Pier of New Haven, Conn. is working on an every-name index to volumes 1-4, as reported in the National Genealogical Society Newsletter, 17 (1991) 3:71. This index will be available at the NYG&B Library in the near future.

At the front of volume 4 is an alphabetical list of the families showing the pages on which the basic account and later additions and corrections appear. This list includes families treated very briefly; they are not included below.

*Additions and corrections on microfilm reels.  

by Henry B. Hoff, C.G., FASG, FGBS

Originally published in The NYG&B Newsletter, Fall 1993

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