Excerpt from The Birth, Marriage and Death Register, Church Records and Epitaphs of Lancaster, Massachusetts, 1643-1850

T its annual meeting in March, 1880, the town of Lancaster made appropri ation for the preservation in print of its older records of births, marriages and deaths. The publication was by vote entrusted to Doctor Horace M. Nash, town-clerk, and Henry S. Nourse. The latter was designated as editor of the work, and is solely responsible for the manner of its execution.

The returns of the town's first Clerk of the Writs, Ralph Houghton, until October, 1674, were made to the recorder of the Middlesex County Court as required by a law enacted June 14, 1642. A single ragged and discolored leaf of his original manuscript, containing the record of fifty births before 1666, is preserved in the town's archives, having been fortuitously discovered, in 1826, among family papers. More than ten years had elapsed after the setting up in the Nashua valley of the first roof-tree by white men, before Ralph Houghton entered upon his duties as clerk of the writs, and his records are chargeable with some omissions.

The returns of the second clerk, Cyprian Stevens, are found in the Middle sex Registry duly copied from 1680 to 1687. During the interval of six years in which no reports were made to the recorder, there occurred two bloody raids by Indians upon Lancaster, and a temporary abandonment of the settlement. The lists of the numerous victims in the massacres by savages have been com piled from various authorities.

Records of marriages in Lancaster, in obedience to a law dated December 1, 1716, began to be annually given in to the Clerk of the Sessions of the Peace for Middlesex in 1718, and are found registered until 1730. Between 1686 and 1726 all regular town records are wanting, a volume having, it is conjectured, been destroyed by fire. During the whole of this period John Houghton was probably the town-clerk. The church records extant open with the settlement of Reverend John Prentice in 1708.

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