Town Meeting Records

Explore how the Dartmouth Historical and Arts Society transformed more than 600 pages of Old Dartmouth Town Meeting Records into a practical resource for historical research. These release notes explain the remarkable preservation journey of records dating from 1674 to 1787—from nineteenth-century handwritten transcriptions, to microfilm, to digital images, and ultimately to an indexed online research tool. The document also shows why these records matter far beyond present-day Dartmouth: they offer a window into the people, issues, and workings of local government in the original town of Dartmouth, whose territory eventually became Dartmouth, New Bedford, Westport, Fairhaven, and Acushnet.