In this 250th anniversary year, there must be heavy use of important Revolutionary War record sets at FamilySearch.
The Massachusetts State Archives (MSA) holds a vital collection called “Muster Rolls of the Revolutionary War.” Not just muster rolls, but thousands of documents of all kinds relating to the war organized into 77 scrapbook volumes. They were microfilmed on 44 reels and are viewable from the FamilySearch catalog at:
https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/729681
All 44 reels are viewable without restrictions, and all are processed for full-text search. Full-text search is a fine thing, but a fantastic index was already compiled in the nineteenth century: over 641,000 index slips, each summarizing the context of the document in which a name appears and citing that document by volume and page within the “Muster Rolls” collection. These slips were microfilmed on 259 (!) reels, catalogued and imaged on FamilySearch here:
https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/746935
The information on the index slips, omitting the volume-page citations to the original documents, was extracted into the 17-volume alphabetized register, Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1896-1908), accessible in many places, including Hathitrust:
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008555379
(Because the catalogue entry at Hathitrust misspells “revolutionary” as “revoluntionary” in the title, this entry does not come up in index or google searches unless one types the same error. One can now buy individual print-on-demand volumes of this register on Amazon and eBay with this typo on the cover. . . . )
For over a century the published Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors register has been the first point of reference for the 641,000 names in the Massachusetts “Muster Rolls” collection. But now that the slip index is online as well as the original documents to which the index slips refer, we have a direct path to the original records, online, for each reference to a Massachusetts soldier or sailor.
Almost. . . .
I have noticed two glitches with the 259-reel slip index set at FamilySearch. The first glitch is minor: the first 7 reels (Aacher, James, to Atwood, Jesse) are, by some omission, not listed in the FamilySearch catalog entry.
They are, however, listed and linked in the corresponding Digital Collection waypoint table with this long URL:
Furthermore, and more significant: 7 out of the 259 index slip reels (not the same 7 reels omitted from the catalog entry list) are inexplicably restricted and can’t be viewed. Those reels are:
Hancock, David – Harlow, Ebenezer: DGS 7843560
Mclellan, James – Melwell, John: DGS 7843911
Melwell, John – Metcalf, Samuel: DGS 7843910
Metcalf, Samuel – Mills, Drake: DGS 7843909
Selden, Jesse – Shaw, David Jr: DGS 7843874
Sweet, Nathaniel – Tarbell, James: DGS 7843853
Thompson, Joseph – Tidd, Amos: DGS 7843849
(The three “M” reels, shown in this screenshot, are contiguous, the others are not.)
Seeing as how this seems to be 7 randomly flagged reels out of a set of 259, I am not sure there could be any consistent privacy or licensor-refusal basis for them to be restricted.
As an example to compare use of the printed register, the index slips, and the original record in the “Muster Rolls” collection scrapbook, here is Richard Allin, a formerly enslaved man from Barrington, Rhode Island, a three-year veteran of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment who then went to sea, where on 26 September, 1780, he was listed as a seaman on the privateer brig Adventure out of Boston in a ship’s muster:
Printed register entry (Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors, vol. 1, p. 184 — note spelling of “revoluntionary” in the Hathitrust item title at upper left):
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89058651332&seq=230
Because Richard Allin (spelled Allen in the printed register) falls in one of the first seven reels of the index slips set, it needs to be accessed from the digital collection waypoint list rather than the catalog reel list, as noted above. But scrolling alphabetically it is only the matter of a few minutes to find the index slip corresponding to the register entry:
https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSQZ-N9TZ-6
The index slip refers to volume 40, page 40, of the “Muster Rolls” collection, which can be found by manually paging through the reel for vols. 39-40 linked from the reel list in the catalog entry. Richard is here:
https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSJ7-C9NR-G
Here, as with thousands of documents available through this set, we are taken far beyond Richard Allin’s dry entry in the printed register, to a list of shipmates, together with infinite small details which bring these ancestors to life for us.
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