The New England states are known for the relative completeness of their family records, due both to the fact that such records were considered to be important at the local level and to the fact that they have been generally well preserved. In Connecticut, as in other New England states, the earliest vital records, some dating from as early as 1640, were kept by individual town clerks, and although valuable to the genealogist, the form and content of these records varied considerably. This gradually changed as each state began to impose standards for the creation and maintenance of vital records. In Connecticut, the establishment of the State Board of Health in 1870 brought about a general improvement in the keeping of vital records, but it was not until 1897 that town clerks were required to furnish copies of new records to the State’s vital records unit.

In 1914, under the direction of Lucius Barnes Barbour, a project was initiated to abstract and index all extant records of the early Connecticut townships. The project, which focused on vital records dating to about 1850, involved examining the original record books, abstracting entries onto sheets of paper, and preparing a state-wide surname index. Barbour’s work was largely completed by 1926 and was placed in the Connecticut State Library at Hartford. More recent efforts have extended Barbour’s work of abstracting records to cover the period 1850 to 1900, although these abstracts have not been included in the state-wide index.

Barbour’s state-wide index consists of over one million individual entries arranged alphabetically by surname. After the index, there is a bound volume of abstracts for each town, and at the beginning of each volume is a description of the original records from which the abstract was obtained. The vital records of Fairfield, for example, were abstracted from three volumes of land records, one volume of vital records, and one volume of marriage records. Both the index and the abstract volumes are cross referenced to the original records. For example, the citation "Fairfield LR-123" indicates that the event was recorded in the town’s second book of land records, page 123. The collection is simple to use and, considering its depth, can be a very effective tool in tracing Connecticut families well back into the seventeenth century.

Clayton Library owns this entire collection on microfilm. The index is contained in eighty reels of microfilm, and the abstract volumes, arranged by township, are contained in seventeen reels. To access the collection, researchers should inquire at the microprint desk on the second floor of the library.