Thanks David -- this is a great site! Lots of information and I was able to locate several Newport burial sites for some early SISSON's. Regards, Joan L. Fitzsimmons Richard&Mary 1; George 2; Richard 3; George 4; Peleg 5; Richard 6; James 7; George 8; Charles H. 9; Warren R. 10; Natalie R. (Fitzsimmons) 11; Michael K. (Fitzsimmons) 12 [and me - Joan (Lacy Fitzsimmons) In a message dated 9/23/03 8:04:14 AM Eastern Daylight Time, [email protected] writes: X-Message: #1 Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 12:56:55 -0400 From: "David Sisson" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Message-ID: <[email protected]> Subject: [SISSON-L] New England Ancestors dot org Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Dear Friends and Cousins, I've been pushing membership in the wonderful New England Historic Genealogical Society for many years, here on the Sisson List, and among my genealogy friends, both virtual and real. If you have New England ancestors, Sisson or otherwise, membership in this organization is hard to beat, particularly as nearly everything is available online, and published genealogies can be borrowed through the mail. The following article is from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright 2003 by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published here with the permission of the author. Information about the newsletter is available at http://www.eogn.com. David Arne Sisson NewEnglandAncestors.org The New England Historic Genealogical Society, founded in 1845, is the country's oldest genealogy organization. The five charter members (Charles Ewer, Lemuel Shattuck, Samuel G. Drake, John Wingate Thornton, and William H. Montague), a group of merchants and book dealers, envisioned an association devoted to "collecting, preserving, and publishing (occasionally) genealogical and historical matter relating to New England families". Throughout its 158-year history, the New England Historic Genealogical Society has been a leader in the genealogy world. This society has always taught its members the proper methods of genealogy scholarship. The New England Historical and Genealogical Register (notice the slight name change from that of the Society) is one of the leading examples of high-quality genealogy research with scholarly articles published about many New England families. It is also the oldest of all the genealogy publications, having been published four times a year for the past 155 years. The NEHGS Register system, used in that publication, is a standard method of listing genealogy information in narrative form. Many other publications also use the Register System as invented at NEHGS. The Society's library and archives in Boston hold some of the best records available anyplace for those researching New England ancestry. In fact, the manuscript collection of the Society is priceless, with a wealth of information not available elsewhere. The focus is primarily New England, but in recent years this has been expanded to include the ancestral homelands of many New England's immigrants: eastern Canada, England, Ireland, and more. There is but one problem: these documents are located in Boston! Not everyone interested in these records can easily travel to read them. This is a large society with more than 20,000 members, more than half of whom live outside of New England. Even those who live within a few hundred miles of the Society's location in Boston may find it inconvenient to go to the library in person. Luckily, the Society has found an excellent method of serving those members. While steeped in tradition, the New England Historic Genealogical Society also has become a high-tech organization in recent years. Under the guidance of Executive Director Dr. Ralph Crandall, the New England Historic Genealogical Society now is a leader in electronic publication. Luckily for Society members who do not have convenient access to the Boston repository, this information is available at home, both online and on CD-ROM. I have written reviews of a number of NEHGS CD-ROM publications in past newsletters. This week I spent some time on the Society's Web site, available at www.NewEnglandAncestors.org. Some of the introductory information is available for everyone to see. However, the "good stuff" is kept behind user IDs and passwords and is available only to Society members. The crown jewel in the online site has to be The New England Historical and Genealogical Register - 1847-1994. The Register has featured articles on a wide variety of topics since its inception, including vital records, church records, tax records, land and probate records, cemetery transcriptions, obituaries, and historical essays. Authoritative compiled genealogies have been the centerpiece of the Register for more than 150 years. Thousands of New England families have been treated in the pages of the journal, and many more are referenced in incidental ways throughout. These articles may range from short pieces correcting errors in print or solving unusual problems to larger treatments that reveal family origins or present multiple generations of a family. Every page of this publication is available online through 1994. The register is searchable by a combination of first name, last name, start year, and end year. In addition, the search may be for exact spelling of words, "begins with" searches, or Boolean searches. The user can also find information by entering the exact page number(s), a useful feature after finding a reference to the Register in some other publication. The appropriate page from the Register is displayed on-screen as a graphic image. Each image can be printed or saved to a local hard drive as a GIF image, the latter of which can be imported into other applications. The Register is but one of the online publications available. It isn't practical to list all of the other publications available on the Web site, but here