Excerpt from History of Oxford, Vol. 1: Church Records, Births, Marriages, Deaths, Etc

Two or three memories may sometimes reach back a hundred and fifty or two hundred years, but the aged sires and matrons whose fathers told them what their grandsires saw and did a century and a half ago are fast passing away. Even the old records, brown and brittle with age, are crumbling and disappearing. Three of the closely written leaves of the oldest volume of Oxford records, which evidently gave the earliest vital statistics of the parish, are gone, while others are so worn as not to be fully decipherable. Old documents are destroyed by accident or scattered far and wide by the migration of families. In view of this, and to bring these matters into convenient form for reference and preservation, the following pages have been compiled.

The original parish records are in two volumes, one of which was kept by the pastor and contained a record of such matters as came under his direction, and the other by the clerk of the society, containing a record of the society meetings and of such business as the laws of the colony reserved to laymen.

Many names were found of which it is difficult to determine the exact spelling, and others in which the spelling is evidently incorrect. Knowing that the value of such records depends upon their reliability, great care has been taken to make a correct copy.

The figures on the right of pages 23 to 27 and 34 to 53 are in the original record and were evidently intended to show at a glance the number of the event recorded.

The incompleteness of the town record of deaths, pages 76 to 79, is to be regretted, yet even as it is they will be of great value. It will be seen that on these pages the children are mostly omitted, the registrar evidently entertaining the strange idea that it was unnecessary to record the deaths of the little ones.

Those who may be able are requested to furnish any information, old papers, etc., which may aid in making the remainder of the work more complete and interesting.

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