Excerpt from Our American AncestryCounty Court Houses. In these I found the probate rec ords disclosing the ancient wills with their autograph signatures, the inventory of the estates, their details often disclosing personal eccentricities, habits and fancies, the distribution to the children, with enlighten ing side remarks, here and there a ¿ash of illumina tion disclosing the long sought family name of the mother. Then in the Recorder's othee are the copies of deeds With buyer and seller or parental donor, the boundary lines disclosing the neighboring families with marriageable children. Early church records where pre served, are also fruitful and in many ways significant. With one exception, no ancestor of ours consciously left for inquiring posterity the slightest clue to him self. Such vestiges of them as have been preserved were wholly undesigned and unconscious. No one of them dreamed that any descendant of his would try to look him up. Nor did the Puritans themselves have the least pride of ancestry. Few indeed were the fam ily trees they brought with them. They thought nothing about it. We, their proud descendants, know and care about their forebears. Never did the question to them utterly trivial enter their minds.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.