This scarce work is an alphabetically arranged listing of 18th-century inhabitants of Litchfield compiled from town records of birth, marriage, death, probate, and so on. While the descriptions vary from one person to the next, for most of the roughly 1,500 Litchfield pioneers listed here we are given the pioneer's place of birth or origin, names of siblings, date of death, name of spouse(s), date of marriage, and names, with dates of birth, of all children. Appended to the lineages is a useful table of all the buildings standing in Litchfield in the year of the book's original publication, 1849, with the names of their builders and occupants.
Following is a list of the principal families covered by Mr. Woodruff: Adams, Addis, Agard, Allen, Ames, Atwater, Bacon, Baldwin, Barnard, Barns, Bassett, Bates, Blackman, Blake, Bradley, Beech, Beebe, Beecher, Beers, Benton, Beuon, Bidwell, Bird, Birge, Bishop, Bissell, Bristol, Boardman, Bolles, Brooker, Buck, Buell, Bull, Burgess, Butler, Camp, Case, Catlin, Champion, Clark, Cramton, Cleaver, Clemons, Coe, Collins, Collier, Cook Crosby, Churchill, Culver, Curtiss, Deming, Denison, Dickinson, Douglass, Dudlee, Durkee, Dutton, Emmons, Emons, Ensign, Fairbanks, Farnam, Frisbie, Ford, Frost, Gallop, Garnsey, Garritt, Gates, Gay, Grannis, Grant, Graves, Gibbs, Gilbert, Gillett, Griswold, Goodwin, Gould, Gunn, Hall, Harris, Harrison, Hart, Haskin, Hebbard, Holmes, Hopkins, Horsford, Humaston, Huntington, Jenkins, Johnson, Jones, Knapp, Kellogg, Kelsey, Kilborn, Kirby, Landon, Lee, Lewis, Linsley, Little, Lord, Lyman, McNeil, Mansfield, Marsh, Mason, Merriman, Minor, Moore, Morris, Moss, Moulthrop, Munger, Murray, Olmsted, Orton, Osborn, Palmer, Parker, Parmelee, Parsons, Plant, Peck, Pierpont, Phelps, Preston, Potter, Plumb, Reeve, Rogers, Ross, Rossiter, Russell, Sanford, Stanley, Starr, Seely, Seymour, Sheldon, Shephard, Smedley, Spencer, Steward, Smith, Stoddard, Stone, Strong, Taylor, Tracy, Thomson, Throop, Turner, Tryon, Vail, Wadsworth, Wallace, Ward, Waugh, Way, Webster, Welsh, Westover, Wetmore, Wittlesley, Wright, Wolcott, Woodruff, and Wooster.