At the signing of the Magna Charta, twenty-five men, representing the barons, signed as sureties of the baronial performance, in effect pledging the barons to fulfill their obligations to the Crown in accordance with the terms of the Great Charter. Of these twenty-five sureties only seventeen have identified descendants. Each of the seventeen is represented in the celebrated "Magna Charta Sureties," which traces their connections--line by line and generation by generation--to approximately 160 American colonists. Eight years have passed since the publication of the last edition of this work, however, and in the interval a great many additions, corrections, and revisions have accumulated. Brought to a very high standard by the unremitting efforts of its editor, Walter Lee Sheppard, Jr., this fifth edition incorporates new lines, corrects errors in existing lines, adds recently discovered material, and supplies references where they had previously been omitted. The result is a reliable and authoritative collection of interlocking pedigrees which carry the ancestry of some 160 American colonists back to the thirteenth century. With the possible exception of Weis's "Ancestral Roots" (also published by Genealogical Publishing Co.), this is probably the very best work ever written on the pre-colonial ancestry of American colonists.

This book covers the history of multiple families whose only overarching connection is that they were all the ancestors of Robert Hilton Squires II, my brother-in-law. But these various genealogical strands intersected with many pivotal eras in English colonial and later American history. Thus in some strange way the history of this one contemporary person is a microcosm of the story of America.

A fascinating book covering fourteen generations of the extended Purchase family. The Purchase ancestors from England were related to Rev. Charles Haddon Spurgeon from London and were missionaries to Southern Africa. They settled in Northern Rhodesia and raised their families under very primitive conditions. In addition to instilling Christian principles into local Africans, they taught them common farming and building skills. The descriptions of confrontations with wild animals and interactions with native Africans are at times riveting. Successive generations of Purchases spread out all over the world.