The Harford Family (1372-1900) by Alice Harford: A New Edition with Scholarly Annotations and an Introduction by Samuel J. Rogal

"To write the history of a large family whose various roots and branches extend over more than six centuries emerges, in this mind's eye, as an Herculean task that few persons would dare to consider and a lesser number to undertake, even with the technological advantages bestowed on twenty-first-century research. Consider, then, the disadvantages thrust upon the researcher of the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, even if he or she lay claim to membership of that family: nothing resembling the computer or internet; limited telephone service; travel by train to cities and towns; by horse-drawn vehicles to isolated provincial villages; poring over published narratives and descriptions that might have or have not been accurate; searching parish records; hours bent over and down to read and note the aged etchings upon gravestones and church memorial plaques; conversations with persons whose memories and recollections might not always had been clear or had been clouded by time; sifting the anecdotal from the factual; placing hundreds of names upon scores of genealogical charts and tables; transferring hundreds of handwritten notes to typewritten pages.
Alice Harford must have done all or most of the above to produce, in 1909, her Annals of the Harford Family." -From the Editor's Introduction