Ebook Genealogy of the Dodge Family

At the meeting of the Dodge family in Salem, in 1879, a committee for the preparation and publication of the genealogy of the family was appointed, consisting of Reuben Rawson Dodge, of Wilkinsonville, Mass.; Christopher Gore Dodge, of Providence, R. I.; Ben Perley Poore, of W. Newbury, Mass.; Rev. Dr. Eben Dodge, of Hamilton, N. Y.; and the Hon. Wm. E. Dodge was appointed treasurer of the committee. As no one of this committee could lay aside his private business and devote himself to the clerical drudgery and the tireless pursuit of obscure facts and records, it became evident within a few years that a genealogy of the Dodge family of Essex Co., Mass., would not be published until some individual assumed the labor and responsibility of the work. Several persons outside of the Committee of 1879 collected a great deal of material, at much waste of effort, for want of being able to co-operate. Having done something in this field in 1875-6, and later, I resumed the work in October, 1891, as a congenial pursuit, and to rescue from oblivion the early records of our family, then rapidly being lost or destroyed. Since that time I have made an abstract of all the deeds of Essex and Worcester counties, in which a Dodge was a party, from 1640 down to 1784, and others, amounting to about 1,900 in all, and an abstract of all the probate records in those counties down to about 1818. I believe I have nearly exhausted the records of the various towns in those counties.

I have also had the active and generous assistance of Mr. Ira J. Patch, of Salem, who has a most valuable and systematic collection of information upon the genealogy of the Dodge and Patch families. Hon. John I. Baker, of Beverly, for a lifetime has preserved every item of information relating to the Dodge family that he could obtain; and this mass was kindly placed in my hands.