Excerpt from The Descendants of Polly and Ebenezer Alden: Who Were Sixth in Descent From John Alden, the Pilgrim

In the following pages an attempt is made to bring into order the details of descent of two of the lines of the posterity of John Alden, the Pilgrim. Mainly they are a record of our researches, and of the labor of our many friendly helpers. There can be no question of the value and the necessity of such work as this, even if imperfectly done, if it is once conceded that his worth while to preserve records of descent; and one who attempts to follow any line of our family in the first two hundred years, when there were few Plymouth or Bristol County towns in which a John or Joseph or David or Ebenezer did not live, and in some more than one at the same time, will need all the light that he can get from any source in arriving at the truth as to the parentage of a given person. It is useless for us to regret that this record of a sister and brother is in double form, and that some of the facts connected with their common ancestors are stated more than once in the historical sketch that precedes the matter comprehended under the title-page. The daily duties of each have left too little time for even this result, and the genealogist who uses our work must exercise what patience he can with the repetitions. To the descendants of either the duplications of fact will seem less vexatious.

This double plan of work, by which each of us becomes solely responsible for his work, does not extend to the arrangement of the order of statement, in which a plan which seemed on the whole the least objectionable has been adopted. Each Alden mentioned will be distinguished by an Arabic numeral before the name, and the relationship to the immediate ancestor will be shown by the number of that ancestor after the name.

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