That book was falling apart so i had it rebound in 1980 when we lived in Germany.
As you can imagine, since Richard Sears, the Pilgrim, settled in the East Precinct of Yarmouth, Cape Cod about 1639 the book is chock full of Cape Cod folks. When i started to understand the "Register format" and figure out how the book was laid out i realized my Grandfather, Leslie R. Sears, was not listed. He was not born until 1892. May did not stop with the publication of the first edition. He continued to collect more information about the family which he would write on note paper and insert into his personal copy of the book at the appropriate spot for later updates. As i continued to gather updates to May's book i corresponded with many descendants. Today that correspondence fills fourteen file boxes and i have scanned all the information into PDF documents and sorted them by contributor's last name in a computer folder I call the Sears Archives. Currently in these archives there are almost 1,000 folders containing 124,000 files comprising 189 gigabytes of data. And i still have more to include from old emails that i have received the past 15 years. That archive will be available at the Sears Chapel (Christ Church), Longwood Mass., sometime next summer when i haul all those boxes up there.
In my search for more of Richard's descendants i placed ads trying to contact descendants in Yankee Magazine, and Genealogical Helper. I started using the online genealogy databases like GEnie (GE Network that provided dial-up to our town) and to forums and message boards that you dialed into to exchange data. I haunted many libraries including the great LDS library here in Oklahoma City, visited the mother library at Salt Lake City and the wonderful genealogy repositories on Cape Cod like the Sturgis Library and Snow Library. Whenever i would visit a college to recruit engineers for my company i always found time to visit there library and look in the reference sections for Who's Who and search online catalogs for Sears authors like the WorldCat.
Along the way I corresponded with Corinne Weiss, a descendant who had come across Samuel P May's personal copy of his published book with all of those interleaved hand-written notes. She allowed me to photocopy everything at a local office store in Midland, Texas. Later when she died her husband knew of my interest in the book and gave it to me. At that point i scanned everything and made a CD with the images that i have provided to many researchers. I also tried to make notes in my family copy of the book to make it look like May's personal copy. Since i had all the information i could glean from the book and i was worried about its preservation, i donated the book to the New England Historic Genealogical Society, where both May and I are members! The NEHGS also has a typescript prepared by May which looks very much like the second edition of the book, although it was never published.
I entered all the data from this book into Personal Ancestral File (PAF) with the help of my uncle Bob Sanders. From that i was able to publish my own Sears Genealogical Catalogue in 1992. Just about 100 years after May's publication. Carmen Wendt recently pointed out to me that my book is also scanned and online at https://archive.org/stream/
A few years ago i transferred all the data to FamilyTreeMaker since i was using Ancestry.com extensively at that point. I recently "printed" out the descendants of Richard Sears and they now comprise almost 22,000 folks. Can you imagine 22,000 grand-kids?!
Well i better hit publish so i don't lose this memory.
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