Originally published in a dozen or more parts between 1897 and 1919, this is not only the genealogical record of a New England town but the complete record of an entire region, that of the lower Merrimack Valley. Not content with publishing the genealogies of more than 300 families, each traced through at least five or six generations in accordance with the most rigid standards of documentation, Hoyt further provides us with hundreds of pages of source records, including thousands of baptism, marriage, and death records from the period 1720 to 1800, many of them compiled from record sources which no longer exist.