This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Surnames: Colgrove, Colegrove, Tanner, Whitford, Sweet, Hiames Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/XcB.2ACE/292.1 Message Board Post: Wyoming is a village, not a town. In RI, as in the rest of New England, vital records are normally recorded by town, not village or county. Wyoming is a village which spans the border of the Town of Hopkinton and the Town of Richmond. So you should look at both those towns. Going back in time, both Hopkinton and Richmond were originally part of the Town of Westerly, so the earliest records for the Wyoming area would be in the Westerly records. For a brief time, Richmond was in that part of Westerly that became Charlestown in 1738 before being separated in turn from Charlestown as Richmond in 1747. So there is a brief span of records for what became Richmond that are found in the Town of Charlestown. Hopkinton was separated directly from Westerly in 1757. Westerly itself goes back to 1669. So it is important to know what timeframe you are looking at, so that you can look in the right town records. By the way, the land and meeting records in all these towns are far more complete than the vital records, so you are shortchanging yourself if you limit yourself to the various published indeces of vital records and censuses. These land and meeting records must be manually searched. The other original King/Washington County town was Kingstowne, which became in time the separate Towns of North & South Kingstown, Exeter, and finally Narragansett. Kingstowne goes back to 1674. Westerly, founded in 1669, was thus the first town in Kings County, which was renamed Washington County after the Revolution.