Pittsfield Vital Records Volume One

Pittsfield, MA Volume One-Births, Marriages/Intentions---

Transcribed by Michael Phelps

From FHL Film No. 1902437

      "Here is the Excel file with some Vital Records for Pittsfield. I say "some" because this is only part of the pages I copied from two films from the LDS collection. This set comes from FHL Film No 1902437.  It has entries that run from 1747 (delayed birth record, since Pittsfield was not formed until the 1760s) to 1798.

     As I explained in my previous message to you, the material on this film is actually a TRANSCRIPTION of the original town records. This was done in the late 1800s (not sure of the date), but having seen originals from other towns of this period, I'm sure it was intended to clean them up and make them readable. Anyway, this set comes from Volume I of the town records (with some from Vol II thrown in later in the listing). Each transcription page was line numbered, 1 to 50. I have retained that numbering here, as you'll see in a minute.

      There are two worksheets in this Excel file. One, labeled "Page Sort," is a direct, line for line transcription of the pages covered, including blank lines. The other, labeled "Date Sort," is the same material resorted by date given in the Town Records (TR), to place all these events in time order.

     The page number of the Town Record transcription is noted in column "Copy Page." The line on that page (1-50) is noted on column "Copy Line." For most entries, the page number from the ORIGINAL town record is also noted in column "TR Page." This stopped appearing in the final few pages of this set, so that column becomes empty.

     The events documented here cover three types: (1) births contemporary to the entry in the original TR, (2) births occurring years prior to the entry in the TR (these tend to be clumped together in the transcription, and I assume in the original TR, as if the parents wanted to document the birth dates of their children after the fact), and (3) intentions of marriage. Some deaths are recorded here, but usually only as a notation for a birth event when the child died soon after birth.

     The type of event for each entry is noted in the column labeled EVENT.   Each event typically has two names associated with it (columns NAME 1 and NAME 2). For births, NAME 1 is the child's name, and NAME 2 is the parents' names. For marriage events, NAME 1 is the groom and NAME 2 is the bride. When the TR had an additional comment for the entry, it is placed in the column labeled "Notes in TR."  When I have a side comment for an entry, I have placed it in the column labeled "My Note."

     In most cases, the wording of the marriage intentions was "John Smith and Anne Jones intend marriage." However, on later pages this changed to "Marriage is intended between John Smith and Anne Jones."  In order to maintain the column format here, I simply put the "Marriage is intended..." phrase in the Event column AFTER the names, even though it appeared before them in the original.

     By convention, the TR shows the home towns for brides and grooms.  When this is the same for both, the wording was "John Smith and Anne Jones, both of Pittsfield..." If they were from different towns it would appear as "John Smith of Pittsfield and Anne Jones of Lenox."  In order to fit better with the name columns in this worksheet, I adopted a policy of breaking up the town names using the second version, so even if the town name was common to both it was recorded here as if they were different. That is, "John Smith of Pittsfield and Anne Jones of Pittsfield.." would be used.

     I have tried to place each event on its own line in this worksheet, in order to provide some integrity to the entries. This is a slight modification from the original, since entries like marriage intentions frequently flowed over two lines as the recorder filled out the common phrase, such as "John Smith of Pittsfield and Anne Jones of Lenox intend marriage together." Keeping this all on one line in a compact form seemed to be a better approach for sorting than trying to do an exact line-by-line transcription. In such cases, the line immediately after the first line of the entry is marked as EMPTY LINE. Note that are some multi-line entries that were better kept in the original format over several lines. When I did this, I assigned the same date to each line so that they would sort properly by date.

     For 98% of these entries, a date is given for each recorded event. I have noted the date across four columns in the worksheet, since Excel date number formats do not work for dates prior to 1904. These columns give the month number 1-12 (my insertion due to the variation in month spellings), month by name (recorded here as shown in the transcription, since the name spellings do not follow current conventions), day of the month, and year. For some of the entries on
the final few pages, the date is not given completely. That is, it may be only a year with no month or date, or only a month and year.  I have tried to figure out what the recorder meant, and have inserted
my interpretations of this in the date columns. When I did this, I noted as such in the "My Note" comment column.

     The final column of the worksheet is a combined "date" value used for sorting purposes. It combines the numeric values for year, month and day to create an eight digit value that allows easy sorting.

     I have retained name spellings are as given in the transcription.  When an obvious misspelling appears (by our standards anyway) I have marked it [sic]. When the name was not very legible, I would mark it with 1 or 2 question marks -- (?) or (??) depending on how badly it was blurred in the film.

     Sorry for all the explanations and caveats, but I felt it was important to explain what is in here. I assume you will reformat this material to suit your web page design. I could have made it even messier by separating the names and towns into separate columns, but that would have been overkill...

Mike Phelps
Goodyear, AZ"