This book is absolutely essential to any genealogist researching colonial New England. To fully explain why to the uninitiated is going to require some background info, so bear with me.

Robert Charles Anderson's three-volume series The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620-1633 (a.k.a. "GMB"), published in 1995, contains detailed, methodical genealogical sketches of all known immigrants to the New England colonies during that those early years of permanent European settlement. The pace of immigration to New England picked up dramatically in 1634. How dramatically? Put it this way: Anderson's next series, compiled with collaborators George F. Sanborn Jr. and Melinde Lutz Sanborn and published between 1999 and 2011, is the seven-volume The Great Migration: Immigrants to New England, 1634-1635 (or "GM"). That's right, it took seven volumes to treat all the immigrants during just the next two years.

To similarly treat all the New England immigrants who arrived between 1636 and the end of the New England Great Migration in 1640 would take who-knows-how-many volumes, and who-knows-how-many years. The prudent solution for this problem is this book, The Great Migration Directory.

But, but, but -- the GMD doesn't merely index and list the available published sources for New England immigrants who arrived between 1636 and 1640. It does the same for ALL of them who arrived 1620-1640. For immigrants who are treated in the GMB and GM series, this book doesn't only give volumes and page numbers for those sketches; it also refers to other published sources with important information about the settler. Such sources include published editions of vital records, town records, church records, local histories and the like, as well as reliable published genealogies, be they stand-alone books or articles from major genealogical journals.

Another crucial function of GMD is lies in the fact that for some immigrants treated in GMB and GM, further research has been published since those series came out. Keeping track of journal articles that supplement (or even largely revise) previous accounts of Great Migration immigrants is why revised, updated editions of GMD have been released since its first publication in 2015, and surely more revised editions will be necessary in the future. I, for my part, have been penciling in references to new articles in the margins of my copy, but sooner or later I'll have to buy a new revised edition to make sure I don't miss anything.

Yes, genealogy books are often expensive, and an ordinary person would likely balk at the $80 price I paid for this single 400-page volume. I assure any such persons that $80 is a phenomenal bargain for the amount of crucial guidance I've got out of GMD in the past six years. In fact, for the first two or three years I owned it, I'd guess that I consulted GMD at least once on 90% of the days that I spent working on genealogy.

Bottom line: like the GMB and GM series, GMD is entirely indispensable for any genealogist researching colonial New England. The GMB and GM series are available in their entirety to members of The New England Historic Genealogical Society via its website, AmericanAncestors.org (and, to New England researchers, they are worth the price of an NEHGS membership all by themselves, aside from the many, many other benefits of joining NEHGS, but I digress). GMD, however, is to my knowledge only available in hardback. If you research colonial New England, you can't afford to not buy it. Be glad it exists, pay up, and give thanks to any higher power you observe for Bob Anderson. ( )

A very useful quick reference for anyone with ancestry or interest in the Great Migration of 1620-1640. ( )