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Complete Book of Emigrants, 1607-1776 is an electronic version
of a standard genealogy reference book that has been available on
paper for a few years and is valuable to many people. This CD contains
all four volumes of The Complete Book of Emigrants and also
the additional Complete Book of Emigrants in Bondage plus
a supplement to the "bondage" book. A list of passenger ships known
to have crossed the Atlantic in those years is also included.
These six books are written by Peter Wilson Coldham and originally
published on paper by Genealogical Publishing Co. in Baltimore.
The introduction for the CD indicates that it includes every
word from the original books covering records of approximately
140,000 individuals from archives in England. These records cover
the years 1607 through 1776. Not all individuals who emigrated
are listed as many records of that era were lost. Yet this CD
will include a high percentage of early English emigrants to the
New World.
The CD comes with a tiny 19-page user's guide that slips inside
the "jewel case," and that seems sufficient for this easy-to-use
disk. I'm delighted that the user's guide for this CD devotes
four pages to the topic of documenting sources. The manual tells
why everyone needs to document, tells what should be documented
and then shows an example of a proper citation. The user's guide
also refers to three well-known books on the topic. I suspect
that many genealogy newcomers will purchase these disks; my kudos
to Genealogy.com and Genealogical Publishing Co. for making source
citation guidelines so obvious to the newcomer.
The CD seemed easy to use. In Family Tree Maker the user selects
VIEW and then FamilyFinder. The book then appears on the screen
and the menus seem intuitive. I was able to quickly search for
all the occurrences of EASTMAN. The original progenitor was not
listed but several individuals of that name who arrived in North
America in later years were quickly found. Moving from one occurrence
in the books to the next was done by clicking on an icon. The
speed was almost instantaneous on a 100-Mhz Pentium system running
Windows NT.
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