Pennsylvania Vital Records comprises reprints of virtually every article on births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths that ever appeared in the two most important Pennsylvania periodicals, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography and The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine. As with similar compilations, this work was produced with the object of bringing all such material within reach of the genealogist, for complete sets of these periodicals are almost impossible to find these days, and, in the case of The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine--which lacks a comprehensive index--difficult to use. Our three volumes are, of course, completely indexed--a necessity in a work that contains references to over 100,000 persons!
The vital records that appear here in a total of some 150 articles derive from a mixture of church registers, court records, records of local officials and justices, ministers' records, newspapers, and gravestone inscriptions. They cut evenly across civil and ecclesiastical lines and represent a cross-section of the population of early Pennsylvania, providing, in the aggregate, one of the largest bodies of published source material ever seen. For the period prior to 1820, in fact, they offer the researcher perhaps his best chance of making ancestral connections in Pennsylvania. Painstakingly culled from out-of-the-way sources and neatly consolidated in this handy three-volume work, these heretofore scattered records of baptisms, marriages, and deaths are now accessible to everyone.
