This book is commendable for getting readers all the way to Generation 8 or 9 in some families (i.e. the 7th & 8th generations beyond the pilgrim.) Also, the author has made some remarks about sources used on pages xi-xiii and these are worth reading. One in particular is the reference to findagrave's unreliability, though he kindly does not use that word. The author cites findagrave extensively within the book and points out (in the introduction, which most people skip) that the site is full of random stuff added by readers that the GSMD does not accept. They accept only clear pictures of stones with legible inscriptions. Only. Period. I wish he had noted one more problem - people are not always buried where their stones are. Sometimes this is because the markers were put up much later and intended to memorialize those who "went West" or died at sea or died first, before there was even a burial plot in the town. Being on the same stone with someone is a good indication that the person who erected the stone thought the deceased was the spouse, child, or parent of the other individual on the gravestone. That isn't always true, though, and can also send the reader on a fruitless search for a death record actually on file hundreds of miles away. So remember, consider findagrave (which I use all the time) a tool for directing you to a place to look for a record, or a last-ditch source for a date - but it is still a third-tier source. You may not use it instead of death, marriage, and birth records unless those are proven, in writing, not to exist.
Ditto for previously published family history books he writes about. The ones known to be good tend to tempt users with what he calls "an irresistible urge to harvest 'low-hanging fruit'." An example of this is A Sketch of Elder Daniel Hix, with the History of the First Christian Church in Dartmouth, Mass., for One Hundred Years by S. M. Andrews (New Bedford: E. Anthony & Sons, 1880), downloadable as a searchable PDF from the Internet Archive (archive.org) site. It name drops what seems like every resident of Bristol County related to me. Sometimes the compiler arranged them confusingly but vital records found easily on the NEHGS site help readers sort them out. At least some entries in the new Billington book for Hix and his extended family left out information that is out there for the reader if he/she will go look for it, so don't stop with the silver book. (And technically Hix was the influential pastor of the First Christian Church, on Hixville Road in North Dartmouth, not "the Baptist church of Dartmouth.") I mention all this because too few of us (meaning me, too) do not read the bibliographic and explanatory material written by the authorial and editorial teams at the beginning and ends of the silver books, but we should.
Ditto for previously published family history books he writes about. The ones known to be good tend to tempt users with what he calls "an irresistible urge to harvest 'low-hanging fruit'." An example of this is A Sketch of Elder Daniel Hix, with the History of the First Christian Church in Dartmouth, Mass., for One Hundred Years by S. M. Andrews (New Bedford: E. Anthony & Sons, 1880), downloadable as a searchable PDF from the Internet Archive (archive.org) site. It name drops what seems like every resident of Bristol County related to me. Sometimes the compiler arranged them confusingly but vital records found easily on the NEHGS site help readers sort them out. At least some entries in the new Billington book for Hix and his extended family left out information that is out there for the reader if he/she will go look for it, so don't stop with the silver book. (And technically Hix was the influential pastor of the First Christian Church, on Hixville Road in North Dartmouth, not "the Baptist church of Dartmouth.") I mention all this because too few of us (meaning me, too) do not read the bibliographic and explanatory material written by the authorial and editorial teams at the beginning and ends of the silver books, but we should.
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