St. Mary's residents played a key role in the development of the Catholic Church throughout the whole of America, providing the spearhead of the westward expansion of Catholicism. In 1785, for example, the first of many Catholic families from St. Mary's crossed the mountains to find land in Kentucky, while a few years later, driven by economic necessity, others migrated to Georgia, Missouri, Louisiana, and Texas. Mr. O'Rourke has collected many of the earliest surviving records of the Catholic families of St. Mary's County, Maryland. The most significant portion of the work contains the marriages and baptisms from the Jesuit parishes of St. Francis Xavier and St. Inigoes, which, in the case of baptisms (1767-1794), give the names of children, parents, and godparents, and the date of baptism; and in the case of marriages (1767-1784), the names of the married partners and the date of marriage.

This unique historical and genealogical resource draws on the extraordinarily intact legislative, judicial, religious, and personal records of members of the first Maryland legislature. The two-volume set contains profiles of nearly fifteen hundred men who served in the state's legislature in the first 150 years after Maryland's founding.The major public and private aspects of each legislator's career are quickly discernible: family background, marriage, children, social status, religious affiliation, occupation, other offices held, and military service. Many entries include a brief summary of a legislator's stance on public and private issues. A final category, wealth at death, inventories the legislator's estate and notes any significant changes in wealth between first election and death.

This volume contains a compilation of records which show familial relationships, ages (deponents and servants), dates of birth, marriage and death, and names of tracts. This valuable data was drawn from wills, inventories and accounts, church registers (T

In this second edition, Mr. Heinegg has assembled genealogical evidence on 390 Maryland and Delaware Black families (90 more than in the first edition) with copious documentation from the federal censuses of 1790 and 1810 and colonial sources consulted at the Maryland Hall of Records, county archives, and other repositories in Maryland and in Delaware.

New from the Maryland Historical Society, the story of Southern Maryland’s Native people. Here at last is the story of Southern Maryland’s Native people, from the end of the Ice Age to the present. Intended for a general audience, it explains how they have been adapting to changing conditions—both climatic and human—for all of that time in a way that is jargon-free and readable. The authors, cultural anthropologists with long experience of modern Indian people, convincingly demonstrate that all through their history, Native people have behaved like rational adults, contrary to the common stereotype of Indians. Moreover, in the very early Contact Period at least, some English settlers respected them accordingly. Unfortunately, although they never went to war against the English, they were driven nearly out of existence. Yet some of them refused to leave, and, adapting yet again to a changing world, their descendants are living successfully in Indian communities today.

This book of recipes from African American cooks in St. Mary's County, Maryland, was originally compiled and completed in 1975 by the Citizens for Progress and the St. Mary's County Bicentennial Commission. The book was copyrighted and reprinted in 1983 by the St. Mary's County Community Affairs Committee. And in 2004 the legal rights to the book were transferred to the St. Mary's County Board of Library Trustees, who then reprinted the book.

St. Mary's County, the Mother County of Maryland, was founded in 1634 by a hand full of colonists who journeyed across the stormy Atlantic, landing at present-day St. Clement's Island. Although the organizers of the Maryland venture were Catholic, the majority of the settlers were Protestants, many of them arriving as indentured servants. Settlers, regardless of religious affiliation, aided in the establishment of the colony and participated fully in the new government. In 1649, Maryland officially became the birthplace of religious freedom in the New World when the Religious Toleration Act was passed at St. Mary's City. From the colonization of the county, to life throughout the 20th century, this volume explores the people, places, and events that have made St. Mary's County such a unique and integral part of the history of Maryland and this nation.