[CA-SCGS] The California Mayflower Society donates updated “Silver Books” to the Southern California Genealogical Society

Guest post written by Erica Hahn
State Junior Membership Chair
California Mayflower Society

In honor of the excellent genealogical library maintained by the Southern California Genealogical Society and its continuing sponsorship of Jamboree, the largest genealogical conference in California, this November 2016, the California Mayflower Society made a major donation of 24 Silver Books.

SCGS Library acquisition lead Sally Emerson
examines the Silver Books in preparation
for inclusion in the Library.
Photo provided by Erica Hahn

The Silver Books are an ongoing project of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, officially entitled “The Five Generations Project.” Since the books are silver in color, they are known as the Silver Books.

These are meticulously researched volumes documenting with primary sources, all the known descendants of passengers on the Mayflower ship for the first five generations. Although it is called the Five Generations Project, in reality since the children of the fifth generation are included it takes these families through six generations. They are regularly revised as new information becomes available.

The donation began when two members of the California Society, Marcia Maloney, the Deputy State Governor South, and Erica Hahn, the State Junior Membership Chair, did a presentation at SCGS in Oct 2016 on joining a lineage society. The two looked over the silver book collection in the library and noted that it was not fully up to date and lacked a number of the more recent volumes. They went back to the State Society which enthusiastically supported purchase of the volumes to bring the SCGS library up to date.

For researchers of New England ancestry, even if not Mayflower descendants, this information is a gold mine. For those pursuing a possibly Mayflower line the books are even more valuable, because this information is not on line. As a result of the donation, SCGS now has the most complete set of silver books in Southern California.

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SCGS sincerly thanks the California Mayflower Society for thier generous donation. For more information on the California Mayflower society, please visit their website at http://www.mayflowersociety.com/index.html. The Silver Books can be accessed at the SCGS Family Research Library in Burbank, California

Southern California Genealogical Society
& Family Research Library
417 Irving Drive
Burbank, CA
www.scgsgenealogy.com