Volume 8 Issue 3 Winter 2001-2002
His Contribution to Local Genealogical Resources
Anyone who researches a family who lived in Colonial Simsbury, or one of the towns that sprang from it after the Revolutionary War, will inevitably encounter the name Albert Carlos Bates. Bates’s book Simsbury, Connecticut: Births, Marriages, and Deaths Transcribed from the Town Records, commonly called the Simsbury vital records, is perhaps the reference book most used by researchers who come into the Simsbury Genealogical and Historical Research Library (SGHRL). The many transcriptions of public and private records that Bates published during his tenure as Librarian of the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford both preserved and made much more accessible the raw material from which genealogy and history are written.
