First Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, 1876

[4], 183, [3] pages. City Document No. 92 Front cover through page 2 separated but present. Bookplate inside the front cover. This second edition is by far the preferred since the reprint has been issued after a careful revision of the text and index. Includes Appendix A (Statements of the Births, Deaths and Marriage for Thiry-five years, from 1811 to 1845, inclusive); and Appendix B. (Most of the text is an appendix that lists the names of taxpayers in Boston, Brookline, and Chelsea for the years 1674, 1676, 1681, 1685, 1687, 1688, 1691, 1695). Also contains an Index of Names (from Abandana to Zeely). William Henry Whitmore (born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, September 6, 1836; died in Boston, June 14, 1900) was a Boston businessman, politician and genealogist. He was the son of a Boston merchant, and was educated in Boston's public schools. He devoted the leisure from his business life to antiquarian research and authorship. For eight years, he was a member of the Boston Common Council, of which he became president in 1879, and he was a trustee of the Boston Public Library from 1885 to 1888. The degree of AM was conferred on him by Harvard and Williams in 1867. About 1868 he was one of the patentees of a machine for making sugar cubes, and in 1882 he patented one for making hyposulphite of soda. His "Ancestral Tablets" (Boston, 1868) was an invention for genealogists, being a set of pages cut and arranged to admit the insertion of a pedigree in a condensed form. He was a founder of the Historical Magazine in 1857, of the Prince Society in 1858, and of the Boston Antiquarian Society in 1879, to which the Bostonian Society succeeded. Whitmore was an editor of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, in which many of his papers first appeared, and The Heraldic Journal, which he established in 1863. William Sumner Appleton Jr. has long been considered by scholars of the history of historic preservation as a pioneer in creating a professionalized preservation field. In 1910, Appleton founded the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities and began to redefine historic preservation practice. With his financial independence and position as the Society's "Corresponding Secretary" he was still very much a wealthy amateur delving into patriotic historical endeavors. Appleton is credited by historians of the preservation movement with developing a professional approach to preservation. He brought a scientific process into the practice of preservation. He also instituted a framework to bring preservation to a regional scale.…