Barbour Collection

This article is about a Connecticut genealogical collection. For other uses, see Barbour.

Barbour Collection

The Barbour Collection consists of abstracts of town, church and other original records in Connecticut. It was first created as a slip index of over a million entries by Lucius B. Barbour at the Connecticut State Library in Hartford, Connecticut. It is a statewide index of births, marriages, and deaths arranged alphabetically by surname. Yellow slips have entries from private sources such as diaries.

To accomplish this massive project, Barbour instructed several genealogists to abstract what they judged to be the best extant vital records in most pre-1850 Connecticut towns. These abstractions and similar information already published for other towns were typed onto printed forms. These form sheets were then cut, producing 12 small slips from each sheet. The slips for towns not previously published were then alphabetized and the information was typed a second time on large sheets of rag paper, which were bound into a separate volume for each town. The slips for all towns plus private records collected by the Connecticut State Library were then interfiled, forming a statewide alphabetized slip index of most surviving records to about 1850. Thus there are two parts of the Barbour Collection: the slip index and bound volumes for individual towns.

Films. They has been microfilmed on 98 films as the Barbour Collection: Connecticut Vital Records Prior to 1850, available at the Family History Library and online at FamilySearch.org. The film collection is alphabetical by surname. The more original and extensive slip index is on films 2,887 through 2,966 and 2.984. The individual books are on films 2,967 through 2,983.

Both forms of abstraction identify the book and page where the original information can and should be found. As Barbour explains in his introduction to each bound volume: "The cards on which this list is based have not been compared with the original and doubtless errors exist."

Internet. The Barbour Collection is at least partially available on the Internet from two major sources.  First, the births are listed for free as part of the FamilySearch International Genealogical Index. Second, Ancestry.com ($), a subscription site, has indexed the 252,432 births, 218,569 marriages, and 56,008 deaths. Note: The index at Ancestry.com is incomplete.
Books. This collection is also available as a 55 volume set of books compiled by Lorraine Cook White, Barbour Collection of Connecticut Town Vital Records, 55 vols. (Baltimore: Genealogical Pub., 1994-2002)[FHL Book 974.6 V2wL]. This format is arranged by town, and then alphabetical by surname.
Images of the typescripts which White transcribed are searchable at Connecticut Vital Records (The Barbour Collection) 1640-1870. ($) They are also online free at FamilySearch,org, microfilms 2967-2983.
Compact Disc. Jacquelyn Ladd Ricker’s The Ricker Compilation of Vital Records of Early Connecticut, CD-ROM (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2006), claims to have abstracted not only Barbour’s 137 town volumes and the books from which the rest of the slips identified as “public records” in the Barbour Index were abstracted, but also many other early Connecticut birth, baptism, marriage, death, and burial record compilations which had been published in The Connecticut Nutmegger. The 1.2 million Connecticut vital records on this CD are not easily searchable and seem to contain many errors, including imprecise identification of their sources.