The following excerpt is from an article posted in the June 23, 2012 edition of TheHour.com:
NORWALK [CT] — While some New England families can trace their ancestry back to the passengers on the Mayflower, most others’ roots are less glamorous and more difficult to ascertain.
Take, for instance, the Barnes family.
“They were regular working people. A lot were oystermen and a lot of shoemakers, which was a little craft everybody did,” said Paul Keroack, semi-retired reference librarian at the Main Library on Belden Avenue and member of the Connecticut Ancestry Society. “A lot of people think, ‘Well, Yankee families came on the Mayflower and their genealogy is done. But no, there’s just loads of families (whose histories) have never been written.”
Over the course of several years, Keroack and two other members of the Connecticut Ancestry Society indexed Norwalk marriage and death records for the years 1848 until 1861, moving from old, bound and handwritten books to printed, alphabetized volumes the names of Norwalk’s most famous and least famous families, and all those in between.
…
The three members of the Fairfield County-based genealogical society compiled the indexes to help residents and visitors find information about their 19th-century ancestors. The group plans to continue its work by indexing death records for the years 1862 through 1878, and marriage records for the years 1862 through 1869.
