The major part of this work is an alphabetically arranged and cross-indexed list of some 20,000 Maryland families with references to the sources and locations of the records in which they appear. In addition, there is a research record guide arranged by county and type of record, and it identifies all genealogical manuscripts, books, and articles known to exist up to 1940, when this book was first published. Included are church and county courthouse records, deeds, marriages, rent rolls, wills, land records, tombstone inscriptions, censuses, directories, and other data sources.

Andrew's & All Faith's Parishes, St. Mary's County - Elise Greenup Jourdan. This work is a compilation of colonial records of these three counties. The very early Charles County records included here were previously published in Charles County Court and Land Records, Volume I and II, and are believed to be the records of Durham Parish. Records of St. Andrew's Parish have been taken from Lucy Harrison's transcription; they were earlier published in Volumes V-VII of the Chronicles of St. Mary's. Calvert County marriages have been abstracted by Mrs. Jourdan from the Scharf Collection. Mrs. Jourdan has consolidated these earlier published records along with the registers of Trinity Parish and the registers of Christ Church Parish and the registers of All Faith's Parish. The only other known vital records of this tri-county area are the Catholic records of St. Mary's County that have been published in Catholic Families of Southern Maryland, by Timothy J. O'Rourke, and are not included here.

St. Mary's residents played a key role in the development of the Catholic Church throughout the whole of America, providing the spearhead of the westward expansion of Catholicism. In 1785, for example, the first of many Catholic families from St. Mary's crossed the mountains to find land in Kentucky, while a few years later, driven by economic necessity, others migrated to Georgia, Missouri, Louisiana, and Texas. Mr. O'Rourke has collected many of the earliest surviving records of the Catholic families of St. Mary's County, Maryland. The most significant portion of the work contains the marriages and baptisms from the Jesuit parishes of St. Francis Xavier and St. Inigoes, which, in the case of baptisms (1767-1794), give the names of children, parents, and godparents, and the date of baptism; and in the case of marriages (1767-1784), the names of the married partners and the date of marriage.

This scarce work is an alphabetically arranged listing of 18th-century inhabitants of Litchfield compiled from town records of birth, marriage, death, probate, and so on. While the descriptions vary from one person to the next, for most of the roughly 1,500 Litchfield pioneers listed here we are given the pioneer's place of birth or origin, names of siblings, date of death, name of spouse(s), date of marriage, and names, with dates of birth, of all children. Appended to the lineages is a useful table of all the buildings standing in Litchfield in the year of the book's original publication, 1849, with the names of their builders and occupants. Following is a list of the principal families covered by Mr. Woodruff: Adams, Addis, Agard, Allen, Ames, Atwater, Bacon, Baldwin, Barnard, Barns, Bassett, Bates, Blackman, Blake, Bradley, Beech, Beebe, Beecher, Beers, Benton, Beuon, Bidwell, Bird, Birge, Bishop, Bissell, Bristol, Boardman, Bolles, Brooker, Buck, Buell, Bull, Burgess, Butler, Camp, Case, Catlin, Champion, Clark, Cramton, Cleaver, Clemons, Coe, Collins, Collier, Cook Crosby, Churchill, Culver, Curtiss, Deming, Denison, Dickinson, Douglass, Dudlee, Durkee, Dutton, Emmons, Emons, Ensign, Fairbanks, Farnam, Frisbie, Ford, Frost, Gallop, Garnsey, Garritt, Gates, Gay, Grannis, Grant, Graves, Gibbs, Gilbert, Gillett, Griswold, Goodwin, Gould, Gunn, Hall, Harris, Harrison, Hart, Haskin, Hebbard, Holmes, Hopkins, Horsford, Humaston, Huntington, Jenkins, Johnson, Jones, Knapp, Kellogg, Kelsey, Kilborn, Kirby, Landon, Lee, Lewis, Linsley, Little, Lord, Lyman, McNeil, Mansfield, Marsh, Mason, Merriman, Minor, Moore, Morris, Moss, Moulthrop, Munger, Murray, Olmsted, Orton, Osborn, Palmer, Parker, Parmelee, Parsons, Plant, Peck, Pierpont, Phelps, Preston, Potter, Plumb, Reeve, Rogers, Ross, Rossiter, Russell, Sanford, Stanley, Starr, Seely, Seymour, Sheldon, Shephard, Smedley, Spencer, Steward, Smith, Stoddard, Stone, Strong, Taylor, Tracy, Thomson, Throop, Turner, Tryon, Vail, Wadsworth, Wallace, Ward, Waugh, Way, Webster, Welsh, Westover, Wetmore, Wittlesley, Wright, Wolcott, Woodruff, and Wooster.