French Family Association
The Official Website of the Surname French
Harry Dana French’s Research
Harry Dana French was born 9 Nov 1895 in Loudon, Merrimack County, NH, and was a self-employed grocer and grain dealer in Pittsfield, NH. He died in Jun 1971 in Concord, Merrimack County, NH. Most of his life he researched the surname French in New England using books and vital records as computers had not yet been invented. He completed his extended research in 1960 on several different lines of the French family of New England. In order to differentiate his line of Edward French from others, he had to research all New England French lines.
Roland Rhoads discovered his work stored in seven boxes in the basement of the New Hampshire State Library in Concord, held by the New Hampshire Historical Society. He got permission to xerox this research in about 1984.
Art Westneat used this material to enter Harry Dana French’s helpful handwritten notes into a database on his computer before genealogical programs were written. He then wrote a program himself to organize the data. After various editions, he completed this project in January 1992 and printed out over 1,000 pages. As his computer program at that time could only print out the results and not show them on a screen for editing, these paper copies remained with the French Family Association for 22 years until Art had time to scan them and use an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program to digitize the pages and make the searchable and editable.
Mara French numbered these families giving them chart numbers in the order she received them in boxes in the mail. As Harry, Roland, and Art are all descendants of Edward French, FFA Chart #4, that chart was completed first, and Mara put the files on the French Family Association website.
Harry Dana French. Our thanks go to Harry Dana
French, b. 9 Nov 1895 in Loudon, NH, d. 8 Jun 1971 in Concord, NH. Lifelong
French family researcher, whose research is now stored at the New Hampshire
Historical Society in Concord, NH, has solved so many mysteries. As of Jan.
1990, we have acquired his material for Charts #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11,
and 20. He is a triple descendant of Edward French, Chart #4. This material is
not accessible in the stacks. The collection of about 20 boxes is stored in the
basement of the library. Right now the format of these
thousands of papers is either hand-written or typed and printed from a poor
dot-matrix printer. The program that printed these pages is no longer
available, plus the dot-matrix characters are monospaced and, for the most
part, unreadable by a CRT.
Introduction
FFA Charts
Chart 1, Thomas French of Ipswich, Essex, MA
Chart 2, William French of Billerica, Middlesex, MA
Chart 3, John French of Cambridge, Middlesex, MA
Chart
4, Edward French of Salisbury, Essex, MA
Chart 5, John French of Braintree, MA
Chart 6, Richard French of Marshfield, MA
Chart 7, Stephen French of Weymouth, MA
Chart 8, Francis French of Derby, CT
Chart 9, Thomas French of Guilford, New Haven, CT