In 1911 Carlton Sanford published his massive two-volume compilation of every known descendant of our immigrant ancestor, Thomas Sanford, to a total of about 15,600, plus compilations of the descendants of Thomas's brothers and those of several other unrelated immigrant Sanfords -- contained in about 1400 pages of text plus another 200 pages of index. The work was not designed as a two-volume work, but was divided arbitrarily (and abruptly -- almost in mid-sentence), perhaps by the printer, at around the 800-page mark. As it is, each volume is around three inches thick.
With our reliance on computers and the internet, it is easy to miss the incredible accomplishment -- and the amount of work -- represented by these volumes. Imagine at least thirty boxes of 3x5 cards. Imagine the complexity of recording not just that many names but the relation of each to others -- indicating for each individual not just his own information -- birth, death, and marriage dates and places, plus any available career notes, military service, occupation, land transactions, wills -- but also that individual's relationship to parents, spouse(s), and children.
And imagine the effort, the persistence, the diligence to acquire the information. Carlton used the available previously published compilations -- particularly of military service records -- but it is clear that he relied to a large extent on descendants sharing with him their own compilations and transcriptions from family Bibles. This reliance shows up mainly in the unevenness of some of the listings. In some branches, the exact birth and marriage and death dates and places are given. In others, there are only lists of the children with no dates or perhaps with just years. There is lot of information transcribed (surely not by Carlton himself!) from church and town records. In some branches, there are more likely to be baptism dates than actual birth dates.
Massive though the compilation is, it is far from complete. Numerous individuals are listed for whom there is no indication that they remained unmarried or childless, but for whom no descendants are shown. I can imagine Carlton sending out request-letters by the hundreds, with increasingly pleading follow-up letters, trying to track down every far-flung branch of the family, and either hitting dead-ends or getting no responses. Of course, those of us who have tried to compile family trees know how this goes: An old family Bible lists seven children, with five of them reaching adulthood and marrying, and with offspring listed for four of them -- but for Hannah and her husband, just a note: "Moved west, Ohio we think, and never heard from again." And of course some people can be tracked down, but they are too busy to be bothered with such nonsense as family trees, so you can acquire information about them only indirectly -- through public records and the like.
I was -- and am -- impressed by Carlton Sanford's diligence and patience in tracking down and compiling information on distant and mostly unmet relatives, but he felt some frustration. It shows through -- uncharacteristically -- in his write-up on Dr. Drurie Sisson Sanford:
"Mr. Sanford is very proud of his parents and of their career, and well he may be. He merges all in the memory of them, declining to give the author data for a sketch of his own successful life. His interest in this work [i.e., this genealogy] has been earnest and sincere. On two occasions he visited the author, traveling some fiften hundred miles to show his appreciation of the author's trials and labors, which have been so immense that but few Sanfords will realize it to the point of due appreciation" [italics Carlton's].
Well, a belated thank-you, Carlton. I appreciate your efforts.
Impressive as Carlton's compilation was (and is), perhaps his greatest contribution to family history is his discovery of Thomas Sanford's parentage in England. Prior to this discovery, our family (and probably many other Sanfords) had the tradition that we were -- somehow -- descended from Thomas de Saundeford, supposedly one of William the Conqueror's lieutenants. And a book had come out in 1898 saying that Thomas's father was one Anthony Sanford of Gloucestershire, on the basis of a legal document naming Anthony and his son Thomas -- but the document was from 1569, which would have made our ancestor well over 60 when he came to the New World. But research carried out for Carlton Sanford revealed that Thomas was the son of Ezekiel and that four of his brothers eventually joined him in Connecticut.
Carlton Sanford numbered Thomas'sdescendants sequentially, giving Thomas the number 1, his offspring the numbers 2 through 7 (though even there, there is a problem: one apparently late-discovered daughter, Mary, who became 3a); then the children of first child Ezekiel are given numbers 8 through 14; etc. These numbers are of limited usefulness as a system, since they cannot be predicted or calculated but depend totally on the names that have been previously compiled. And once numbers have been assigned, there is no good way of including a newly-discovered individual, except by attaching an "a" or a "b" to the number preceding it. Still, I have included the Carlton Sanford numbers in my database (marked "User ID") simply to facilitate working with Carlton's material (though I have often omitted these numbers from these webpages, since they are -- probably -- of little use or interest to most readers).
Why Genealogy is Fun
In Carlton Sanford's book, I came upon this write-up for David Wooster Sanford, born 1842 and still alive in 1911. First came all the hard facts: He lost one child early, then his first wife and another child died within days. Several years later, he remarried, and a few years later his second wife and two more children died within a week. Then this bombshell:
"He was a natural lawyer and he never lost a case. After several years' practice, his health failed and he was obliged to give up his work. He was quite a natural poet and composed many poems. His second wife was a great disappointment to him, being wholly unworthy. She and her children died and he is now a lonely old man, running a sloop off the coast of Alaska and prospecting at times for gold. Res: Ketchican Alaska."
Somehow this sounded like the "information" that might be provided by a doting sister, one who adored her brother but for whatever reason had never liked his second wife. Hmm, I thought. I seem to recall something about his older sister Mattie. Here's how she's described:
"Her husband [Rev. Bull] was a successful preacher in the Methodist Church. As his able second, Mrs. Bull has done invaluable work. A highly sensitive organization, coupled with keen perceptions and great energy has made her a most useful woman. She has also become a writer of some repute. Her "Bethel-el-Bethel," a beautiful biblical story in verse based on the narrative of Jacob and Esau, has been accepted and highly recommended. "
And here's the zinger -- the final sentence in her write-up:
"Mrs. Bull has furnished a large part of the data for her branch of the Sanford family."
What more need we say? I think we have found the source of the description of the "unworthy" second wife and the "lonely old man." And I think we have to take all these judgments with a grain of salt.
When Carlton nods...
My impression of Carlton's book and his accuracy and his scholarship is that he can be relied on. Mostly (maybe 99.97% of the time).
Most of the errors I have found are typos -- and those may be attributable to a typesetter rather than to Carlton himself. And they are easy to spot and easy to fix.
Some mistakes are likely errors in the source material that was given to Carlton (or in some cases, to put it kindly, biased reporting -- see "Why Genealogy is Fun," below).
I have found only one major factual error -- a remarkable statistic in a compilation of 15,000 numbered descendants, plus almost as many unnumbered spouses and other relatives, all compiled in the days before computers. The striking error has to do with two women, both named Mabel Sanford, both born in the early 1740s to different sets of parents. One of them was born in 1744, married a Joel Baldwin, and had four children.
But Carlton has this same information for both Mabels, as though both had married Joel Baldwin, and each had produced four children with the same set of names. I had to go back through a History of New Milford to find which Mabel had in fact married Joel Baldwin. Of course today with a computer plus on-line resources it was fairly easy to spot and to correct this duplication.
