Connecticut's Lone Genealogical Ranger

Where is the line between obsessive and visionary? Lucuis Barnes Barbour, a genealogist, state record keeper and lifelong organizational whiz, used his energies to centralize every vital record in the state. At the turn of the last century he created a collection that remains invaluable to historians and genealogists.

Transcript:

There is a semi-secret story in Connecticut History and it doesn't involve hiding anything in a tree. It's a story of obessession and sacrifice, known only to...genealogists. It's the story of the Barbour Collection of Genealogical Records.

Lucius Barnes Barbour, whose father and grandfather were both well-known military men, took his extreme precision in a new direction: records. He saved every photograph, dance card and ticket-stub from his middle school days, to his graduation from Hartford High and Yale.

He became Connecticut’s first State Examiner of Records in 1911-staying for twenty-three years. Although he worked for the state, he spent his own money to have a team of secretaries copy and centralize every record in every Connecticut town hall and library.

The project cost over 20,000 dollars and after twelve years he and his secretaries had produced some 14, 333 painstaking pages of vital records; They included the birth, death and marriage of every Connecticut citizen until 1850.  

The records were typed (twice) and compiled into volumes, organized alphabetically by town, totaling 55.

Upon his death in 1934, at the age of 46, a citizen wrote in the Courant; “One cannot estimate the value of such a card catalogue to the geneaologist and the student of history. It is priceless….Because Colonel Barbour was so averse to all publicity, this brief outline of his activities is given so that the citizens of our state should have some idea of what he did for it. He was one of its great benefactors.”

Special thanks to everyone at the Connecticut Historical Society.