About Us
The Massachusetts Vital Records Project is made up of a group of volunteers working to transcribe the published vital records of early Massachusetts. This is a series of books published in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.. Commonly called the "Tan Book" series, they contain the majority of the records from earliest times to about 1850. It is the ultimate goal of the project to include other New England states in the databases, as well as records after 1850, to make researching ancestors in this area easier, and keeping records centrally located on one web site. It is our promise that the information on this web site will always be free to access and available to everyone.
The project was founded about the year 2000 by John Slaughter, the current Essex County Coordinator under the USGenWeb Project. At that time, his aim was to provide the vital records of Ipswich as well as book transcriptions for fellow Ipswich researchers. John descends from the Hardy family of Ipswich and Bradford, MA. Shortly after becoming the County Coordinator, he chose to expand the idea to include not only all of Essex County records, but the entire state and region as well.
Jodi Salerno, a direct descendant of John Johnson of Andover, MA, and the town coordinator for both Andover and North Andover under the USGenWeb project came onboard in 2004 with her interest in helping put the Andover records online. Together, they have been able to expand well beyond Essex County, and have attracted multiple volunteers to help put more records online much faster. To date, April 2008, we have over 1,000,000 records online, and we continually strive to make the databases easier to read, easier to search and easier to navigate.
We are very happy and proud to be part of this project, and we both sincerely hope that you are better able to do your family research because of the hard work and many hours provided by so many of our wonderful volunteers.
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