The Old Dartmouth Town Meeting Records Database

The Dartmouth Historical and Arts Society (DHAS) is pleased to be releasing today another significant improvement in the availability for public use, of Town meeting Records from 1674 through 1787, the span from shortly after the incorporation of the town until the date of the ‘first division’, when “New Bedford” was carved off (consisting of present day New Bedford, Fairhaven, and Acushnet). This period encompasses the time when Dartmouth was on the frontier of the Plymouth Bay Colony, until after the American Revolution. It is also an excellent source of primary information about the operation of democracy in action, a town run by its citizens, with all the issues and problems towns faced, both then and now. Also, of course, some issues faced then that are not seen these days!

It is relevant to repeat the history of all the efforts to preserve and protect these important records and to make them more easily accessible for researchers and students of government, history, and genealogy.

In the late 1880’s the Aldermen of the city of New Bedford chose to investigate the condition of the original town records (note; this refers to the original town, we’ll call ‘Old Dartmouth’). They found that the records, held in Dartmouth, were not in good condition and hence made arrangements with the cooperation of Dartmouth, to gather them, transcribe and create an index for them, and thereby ‘preserve’ the information contained in them.

This they accomplished and stored the handwritten transcriptions in the New Bedford archives where researchers might examine them (and the index to them) under supervision.

At a much later date, The Mormon church, as part of a world wide campaign to capture and preserve important primary records, filmed these transcriptions and created microfilm images of them which could be viewed, after acquisition of the microfilm, using a microfilm reader.

Still later, many of the Mormons’ microfilmed collections were ‘digitized’ and made available on the internet by the Latter Day Saints, but this collection was an exception and was not so digitized.

DHAS later, with Dartmouth Historical Commission authorization and help from the New Bedford Free Public Library, arranged to digitize an acquired copy of the microfilm and made the images of the ODTMRs and the index, available on its website DartmouthHAS.org for the public to peruse. Note that the images are of handwritten transcriptions of the original records.

Most recently, the index to these records has been ‘digitized’ via a keyboard, and a navigational console created for going directly to specific pages within the manuscript image (over 600 pages) as pointed to in the index. This is the latest improvement in making this important primary information on early local government available for all researchers and investigators. We encourage scholars of all types to examine this rich lode of historical detail on the original town of Dartmouth, which included (in utero), New Bedford, Westport, Fairhaven, Acushnet and, of course Dartmouth of the present day. It was the practice in those early times, before ‘official’ boundaries for the various towns were established, to insure when appointments were made by the Town Meeting, to that each of the then three major sections were represented, namely Acushena (which consisted of what is now New Bedford, Fairhaven, and Acushnet; Apponegansett (Dartmouth); and Acoxet (Westport). Hence, the local governing leaders of each of these entities are frequently identified in these early records, made before the towns were officially established. This allows us to assert that these records provide a detailed history of the formation and conduct of local government for each of the five political entities carved from the original town of Dartmouth.

Processing the digitized index allows us to present a plethora of specialized “reports” each of which provide links to the manuscript’s words for the indexed items. Among these reports will be: A report giving every individual name mentioned in the ODTMRs, which pages they are found on, and a navigational console to facilitate going directly to the reference and reading the full context. Many other reports, similar in nature but with a different focus will all eventually be presented on our
website. Likewise, initially, we will present “Topics Addressed by Town Meeting, 1674-1787” with navigational console to the manuscript context.

By digitizing the index to these important records we have provided practical ‘finding aids’ based on names and government functions and warrants and minutes from 1674 through 1787. Together with these references to specific page numbers we provide a navigational console for directly steering to the specific manuscript page providing the context of the reference in the handwritten transcription.

Bob Harding
3-19-22