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Welcome to Massachusetts Genealogy Trails Scroll down to see a clickable link of the counties | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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You can now send us your headstone inscriptions instantly
This Massachusetts Genealogy Trails site is hosted by Nancy (Caswell) Washell. I have been working on MA genealogy for almost 30 years. Both my maternal and paternal families lived throughout MA. I feel very passionate that we should have this data online and FREE for the public. Massachusetts is so vital to just about any researcher! Our ancestors should be proud of the excellant record keeping they did. Little did they know hundreds of years later we would want to know more about them, whether they were farmers or lawyers!  Massachusetts takes its name from the Massachusetts tribe of Native Americans, who lived in the Great Blue Hill region, south of Boston. The Indian term supposedly means "at or about the Great Hill".There are, however, a number of interpretations of the exact
meaning of the word. The Jesuit missionary Father Rasles thought that it
came from the word Messatossec, "Great-Hills-Mouth": "mess" (mass) meaning
"great"; "atsco" (as chu or wad chu) meaning "hill"; and sec (sac or saco)
meaning "mouth". The Reverend John Cotton used another variation: "mos"
and "wetuset", meaning "Indian arrowhead", descriptive of the Native
Americans hill home. Another explanation is that the word comes from
"massa" meaning "great" and "wachusett", "mountain-place". Massachusetts, like Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky, is called a "Commonwealth". Commonwealths are states, but the reverse is not true. Legally, Massachusetts is a commonwealth because the term is contained in the Constitution. In the era leading to 1780, when the state Constitution was ratified, a popular term for a whole body of people constituting a nation or state was the word "Commonwealth." This term was the preferred usage of some political writers. There also may have been some anti-monarchic sentiment in using the word "Commonwealth." The name, which in the eighteenth century was used to mean "republic", can be traced to the second draft of the state Constitution, written by John Adams and accepted by the people in 1780. In this second draft, Part Two of the Constitution, under the heading "Frame of Government", states, "that the people...form themselves into a free, sovereign, and independent body politic, or state by the name of The Commonwealth of Massachusetts." The people had overwhelmingly rejected the first draft of the Constitution in 1778, and in that draft and all acts and resolves up to the time between 1776 and 1780, the name "State of Massachusetts Bay" had been used. John Adams utilized this term when framing the Massachusetts Constitution, therefore. In his "Life and Works", Adams, wrote: "There is, however, a peculiar sense in which the words republic, commonwealth, popular state, are used by English and French writers, who mean by them a democracy, a government in one centre, and that centre a single assembly, chosen at stated periods by the people and invested with the whole sovereignty, the whole legislative, executive and judicial power to be included in a body or by committees as they shall think proper." | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Massachusetts was admitted to statehood February 6, 1788The state consists of 14 Counties:
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 This website is a work in progress. Check back often to see what has been added. Our goal is to help you track your ancestors through time by transcribing genealogical and historical data and placing it online for the free use of all researchers. We're new at providing data for states other than Illinois, but if we're able to help even a few people by our efforts, it will be worth it! You can help us to get this site growing by sending in your family's Data. |
